History

Perhaps amusingly, the history of Red Team Tools extends back over a half a decade prior to the existence of our web site and the registration of our domain. As far back as 2009, Deviant Ollam and Babak Javadi were packing kits of picking tools, practice locks, and other educational supplies in order to make them available at the many workshops and events they were conducting. Being mainstays of the locksport community and board members of TOOOL – the Open Organisation of Lockpickers – Dev and Babak leveraged their considerable ties to both the hacker world and the professional security industry to establish purchasing accounts with vendors such as Southern Specialties, Brockhage, All 5 Spring Tool, and Southern Ordinance.

With their appearances at both public workshops and private events occurring two or even three times in any given month, Babak and Deviant were amassing a considerable number of students and professional colleagues who expressed interest in obtaining lock tools… not just during events but often after-the-fact, with requests coming via email. Deviant published some basic price lists on his web site for various equipment parts and handled requests via PayPal, manually addressing individual envelopes. By the end of the year, with Babak’s encouragement, a rudimentary HTML checkout page was implemented using PayPal buttons. Even though all requests would still land in Deviant’s email inbox, now mailing labels could be generated electronically. No more standing in line at the local post office! Rounding out this year of success, Deviant’s first book, Practical Lock Picking, was published by Syngress.

Things proceeded this way for a year or so. Babak and Deviant would process orders approximately once a week or so, sometimes packing as many as half a dozen orders at a time. Their Black Hat training and other professional instructional appearances became increasingly sought-after and their relationships within the physical security industry continued to grow.

The company they co-owned, The CORE Group, was also growing in revenue and prominence.

With annual orders for tools consistently numbering in the three digit range now, the payment processor settings were adjusted and now PayPal would deposit funds into The CORE Group’s bank account.  This was a good thing, given that in addition to their Black Hat training and DEF CON appearances that summer, Babak and Deviant were also being invited to make regular appearances at SANS professional training events around the country.  Somehow, Deviant also found time this year to write his second book, Keys to the Kingdom, which was also published by Syngress.  The CORE Group didn’t yet have the subsidiary named Red Team Tools, but by now we were selecting specific parts from a variety of manufacturers to make our own custom tool kit packages.  The first of what would become many original tool designs was created, with CORE working with our industry partners to produce the small-sized “Cover Jiggler Set” that remains stocked on our web site to this day.

The trend described above continued for the next couple years, with Babak, Deviant, and also their partners and friends manually packing and shipping orders facilitated by simple PayPal webcart buttons.   By 2015, however, with the two primary owners of The CORE Group and their newest associate Robert servicing their clients at home and abroad, the management and oversight of parcels became a task best suited for a third-party firm.  CORE turned to an e-commerce fulfillment company in the region who already had an established passion for this type of operation.  Our original web site, then powered by OpenCart and ShipWorks, launched for the first time at the redteamtools.com domain.  Our very first order was placed by John in Missoula, Montana.  Our largest customer in this period was the firm Lares Consulting who regularly ordered whole “Red Teamer Bags” consisting of a wide variety of physical penetration tools assembled and packaged together by CORE.

For the first few years of officially running redteamtools.com we saw maybe a dozen orders each week, sometimes more when one of the CORE Group partners would present at a conference or conduct a professional training.  Deviant Ollam designed our first Covert Comb Pick tool and produced it in conjunction with our associate Jeff at Hard Case Survival.  In 2018 we made our first contact with Mike M, an aerospace machinist and marvelous hacker and hardware designer.  Mike remains in CORE’s cadre of subject matter experts and has collaborated with us on a wide range of projects over the years.  Many of the Red Team Tools original designs were prototyped and produced in his machine shop.

The year our explosive growth began.  Deviant’s assumption of oversight of the Red Team Tools operations coincided with a quadrupling of the site’s revenue.  Toward the end of the year, Red Team Tools and our associated enterprise, Red Team Alliance, were featured in videos by the Lock Picking Lawyer, increasing our exposure even further.  Our volume of sales began to increase to levels that had not been originally considered by Babak, Deviant, or our fulfillment partners.

The world economy may have slowed considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown months, but Red Team Tools saw nothing but growth in 2020.  Our sales nearly doubled from the previous year and Red Team Alliance training classes similarly saw increasing popularity, even if the majority of the class participants were joining us virtually over Zoom and receiving their hardware toolkits shipped via UPS.

With our orders and revenue nearly doubling again compared to last year’s numbers, after Black Hat and DEFCON this summer it was realized that Red Team Tools would have to migrate to a larger fulfillment operation with greater square footage to house all of our numerous products.  With a warehouse in Iowa handling all of our packing and shipping, our associates there migrated our web domain to the BigCommerce engine and built a new front end for our web presence.  2021 would also be the start of what has been referred to as “the explosion of Red Team Tools product development” with Deviant and his design collaborators pioneering over twenty new original pieces of equipment in the span of 33 months.  Some of the most notable Red Team Tools originals to be developed in 2021 included the Lishi Standoff Spacer, the Lishi Key Cutter Guides, our metal Key Mold-and-Cast trays, and the Devious Decoder Card.

Orders and sales increased yet again.  Deviant and Mike M started working with acrylics and develop the RTT Glow Rod Plug Follower and Fuel Rod BEST SFIC tool.  Deviant also created the Fire Plug tool, with both original prototyping and the mass production done through Mike M.  Tony from 3D Locksport produced a design with Deviant for a combination shim holder / screw cap tool used in the forensic disassembly of lock cylinders.  Engineer and designer Mike D came aboard with Red Team Tools doing 3D modeling and additive manufacturing… his first project with us were the MikeDev KIK Stand lock holders.

Early in this year we outgrew fulfillment partners yet again, moving to a new dedicated facility in Iowa near to our previous location.  The marvelous Chad – whom many of you may have met in correspondence with Red Team Tools about our products and checkout process – joined our team and made our fulfillment operation even more efficient and successful.  Our employee James in our main CORE Group office also started turning attention to Red Team Tools, overseeing and curating our repository of original hardware designs and interfacing with the various machine shops and production vendors who work every day to keep up with the order volume dictated by our customers.  Deviant and Mike M complemented our quick-connect Tubular Pick tool with a quick-connect Key Impressioning tool.  Deviant (a member of the International Association of Investigative Locksmiths) produced an offering of formed-end pin-handling tweezers that have a Teflon powder coating at the request of his peers in that field.  Red Team Tools also launched their most adventurous new product: the REX Blaster with pocket-sized r134a canisters.

As the years continue, it remains our unending pleasure at Red Team Tools to serve both the professional covert entry community and the needs of the public at large.  The majority of Deviant Ollam’s tool designs, while available for purchase on our site, are published in an open-source form on GitHub and released to the public with a non-commercial creative commons license for anyone to fabricate and remix for personal and non-commercial purposes at no charge.  Red Team Tools has also begun resurrecting items that have become unavailable due to shortages or the shuttering of previous vendor businesses.  When Carolina Roller couldn’t keep up with the ever-increasing demand for Traveler’s Hooks, Red Team Tools produced them ourselves in the thousands.  When the creator of the Super Grip Door Strap, Melinda, passed away during the pandemic, we developed an improved variant of their defunct design and made this wonderful tool available to the public once again.  What other tools do you wish existed in the physical penetration and covert entry world?  With consistent growth and endless satisfied feedback from all of you each year, we have no intention of slowing down or stopping the development of our new ideas and new designs.

When the security industry needs penetration equipment for professionals, made by professionals, Red Team Tools is proud to always be here for you.