Red teaming is adversarial testing that tries to break a system the way a real attacker would. Instead of only checking whether controls exist, red teamers probe logic, permissions, workflows, and human responses to find weak points that normal testing can miss.
It matters in cyber security because many failures emerge from combinations of small issues: overbroad access, weak segmentation, unsafe defaults, or trust in a workflow step. In real defenses, red teaming helps validate detection, escalation paths, and incident response. In real attacks, the same mindset is used to chain together ordinary capabilities in unsafe ways, such as turning one permission into unauthorized data access or action. In agentic AI, red teaming is especially useful because the risk is often not a bad prompt alone, but what the system is allowed to do after it receives one.