A blue team is a group of incident responders that are part of an organization’s security department. It identifies, assesses, and responds to a red team’s intrusion and attack simulations as well as real attacks. Simply put, a blue team plays defense opposite the red team.
Take a look at how a red team differs from a blue team below.
Table of Contents
- What Are the Goals of a Blue Team?
- What Are the Benefits of Blue Teaming?
- What Are the Steps in Blue Teaming?
- What Skills and Know-How Should Blue Team Members Have?
Blue Team: A Deep Dive
What Are the Goals of a Blue Team?
Blue teams aim to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and potential security incidents through digital footprint and risk intelligence analyses. To do that, they conduct regular security audits of their organizations’ overall attack surface to enable timely incident response and recovery.
An external attack surface management (EASM) platform that performs automated scans of an entire network and continuously monitors it for vulnerabilities can help with this task. It can show the blue team all the issues or weaknesses they must address, along with their severity ratings and status, in one go.
Once security defenses are up, the team members should educate all employees about the cyberthreats they could potentially face through security awareness training.
What Are the Benefits of Blue Teaming?
Since blue teaming allows security team members to discover flaws and security gaps in connected systems, the organization can benefit by enhancing network defenses.
The breach and attack simulations blue teams perform can reveal security gaps, particularly what solutions the organization may lack, to thwart emerging threats. Once done, they can advise management on other strategies or solutions to employ.
The exercises also improve collaboration between the IT and security teams and, in the process, help develop their organization’s security expertise without having to face actual threats. That said, when incidents arise, they can readily address issues.
Afterward, the members can educate all employees about human-related security risks or those that can stem from their missteps to reduce the organization’s attack surface and minimize human error.
What Are the Steps in Blue Teaming?
Blue teaming involves a five-step process.
- Assess risks: Risk assessment helps the team identify the assets that are most at risk of exploitation so they can be protected first.
- Implement stricter access controls: Controlling user access by ensuring employees can only access the systems, solutions, services, and data they need to perform their jobs is a critical step in protecting their network.
- Monitor network activities: It is not enough to scan for vulnerabilities, monitoring the network for weaknesses continuously is actually the key to effective cybersecurity.
- Make implementation decisions: Blue team exercises can reveal not just a network’s weak spots but also which of the organization’s policies, measures, and solutions do not work. Choosing more effective safeguards that can be implemented is part and parcel of blue teaming.
- Respond to incidents and mitigate risks: Protection does not stop with threat identification. Repairing and preventing further damage and ensuring similar attacks will not succeed again are essential subsequent steps. Also, note that blue teaming is not a one-time occurrence. It must be done regularly for a better security posture.
What Skills and Know-How Should Blue Team Members Have?
Blue teams typically comprise cybersecurity analysts, incident responders, threat intelligence analysts, information security analysts, security engineers, and security architects. All of their members thus collectively have thorough knowledge of an organization’s security strategies, processes, tools, and techniques on top of IT and cybersecurity expertise.
Apart from in-depth technical and security know-how, they also need analysis skills to accurately identify the most dangerous threats to prioritize their responses accordingly. After learning what works and what does not, they must apply security hardening techniques to reduce their attack surface.
And because blue teams play a defensive role in cybersecurity, they should know how to develop and execute incident response plans.
Key Takeaways
- A blue team is a group of incident responders that are part of an organization’s security department.
- Blue teams identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and potential security incidents through digital footprint and risk intelligence analyses.
- Apart from strengthening network defenses, the team improves the collaboration between the IT and security teams and shares their learnings with employees through security awareness training.
- Blue teaming involves five steps—assessing risks, implementing stricter access controls, monitoring network activities, making implementing decisions, and responding to incidents and mitigating risks.
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