DORA: Threat-Led Penetration Testing
As part of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA),Threat-Led Penetration Testing (TLPT) is a regulatory requirement for critical financial entities.
SecAlliance delivers DORA-aligned TLPT engagements that simulate real-world threats, helping organizations validate their ability to detect and respond to sophisticated cyberattacks.
With deep experience across CBEST, TIBER, GBEST, and iCAST frameworks, SecAlliance is ideally positioned to support DORA compliance through intelligence-driven testing.
DORA TLPT refers to Threat-Led Penetration Testing under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the EU-wide regulation focused on strengthening the operational resilience of financial entities.
DORA mandates that certain critical financial institutions and ICT third-party providers undergo intelligence-led penetration testing at least once every three years. These assessments must simulate real-life attack scenarios based on tailored threat intelligence and be conducted by qualified external testers.
The goal is to ensure that organizations can detect, respond to, and recover from advanced cyberattacks, in line with evolving threats and regulatory expectations. DORA TLPT is aligned with existing frameworks such as TIBER-EU and CBEST, but its scope is broader and harmonized across the EU.
We cover Threat Intelligence Assessment and Targeting Intelligence to ensure all requirements are met:
We conduct a structured analysis of the client’s threat landscape, identifying the most credible threats to the organization based on its sector, geography, technology stack, and critical business functions.This assessment defines realistic and regulator-aligned attack scenarios for red team simulation. Each scenario includes associated threat actors, MITRE ATT&CK® techniques, recent campaigns, and relevant TTPs.This ensures that simulated attacks are based on real-world, up-to-date threats, aligned with what DORA defines as representative of the current threat environment. Scenarios enriched with cross-sector intelligence from our ThreatMatch platform.
This provides an in-depth review of an organisation’s attack surface from the perspective of a threat actor. The purpose is to perform attacker-like reconnaissance against the organisation, its assets and its people and to explain how this information, gathered through technical and manual collection techniques, can be leveraged by the threat actor to mount an attack. These findings along with the TTPs of the threat actor feed into the final attack scenarios which are then used by the red teams to mimic a real world attack.In line with DORA TLPT requirements, SecAlliance deliver stailored threat intelligence products that form the foundation of a compliant, intelligence-led penetration test.
