A red team, also known as a “cyber red team,” is a group of cybersecurity professionals organized and authorized to act like adversaries and simulate an attack on a target organization. Unlike cyber attackers, however, who aim to infiltrate a target network to steal confidential information and cause great damage to its owner, the red team’s members mimic threat actors to improve the target organization’s security against any entity that wishes it harm.
Table of Contents
- What Are the Types of Red Teams?
- What Are Red Team Exercises?
- What Are the Steps in Red Teaming?
- What Are the Benefits of Red Teaming?
Red Team: A Deep Dive
What Are the Types of Red Teams?
Red teams come in three forms—internal, external, and hybrid.
An internal team comprises cybersecurity professionals already employed by the organization being assessed. As such, its members already know and understand the company’s IT infrastructure and security policies.
An external team, on the other hand, is made up of cybersecurity professionals not employed by the organization being assessed. Compared with an internal team, they can more adequately simulate an outsider attacker’ perspective because they have no prior knowledge of the organization’s IT infrastructure or security policies.
The last kind—a hybrid team—is composed of both internal and external team members. That said, an organization can enjoy the benefits of both internal and external assessments.
What Are Red Team Exercises?
Read team exercises or simply “red teaming” are cyber attack simulations that aim to evaluate how strong an organization’s security posture is. They are thus designed to identify and resolve potential vulnerabilities in the company’s network that malicious actors can exploit.
Red teaming is usually undertaken by an ethical hacking team or a similar offensive security team. Also known as “penetration testing” or “pen testing,” such teams typically begin their exercises or attack simulations without warning the organization’s security team beforehand.
What Are the Steps in Red Teaming?
Red teaming usually includes several stages described in greater detail below.
Step 1
A red team exercise begins by defining the scope of the engagement. That includes naming specific targets, which can be obtained from a list of the organization’s employees.
Step 2
The next step is to collect intelligence by doing reconnaissance work to determine what the most effective attack methods are. This step requires conducting research on successful campaigns launched by other threat groups.
Step 3
Third, the team needs to plan the attack, including the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they will use. The information they obtained from the previous step can help here, too.
Step 4
Next, the red team launches controlled attacks on the target. Team members typically focus on the weaknesses present in the network that can serve as their attack vectors. Some automated tools can help here, as they can quickly and accurately scan for known vulnerabilities, open ports, dangling DNS records, or virtually anything that can lead to successful infiltration. Here’s a quick view of potential security issues from an external attack surface management (EASM) platform.
Step 5
Last comes analyzing the results of the exercise to come up with recommendations to enhance the organization’s security.
What Are the Benefits of Red Teaming?
The process has the following advantages:
- Red teams can help organizations detect security weaknesses by acting like threat actors. That way, they prevent companies from falling prey to real cyber attacks.
- Red teams (who act as attackers) can work with blue teams (who act as security teams) to assess the effectiveness of each other’s work.
- The team’s exercises can help raise IT security awareness throughout an organization, helping it avoid common attacks.
- Red teaming can also help organizations comply with data security laws and regulations.
Key Takeaways
- A red team is organized and authorized to act like adversaries and attack a target organization.
- The team can be internal, external, or a mix of the two.
- Red teaming typically involves five steps that start with scope definition and end with providing recommendations.
- The exercise can help organizations detect vulnerabilities and other weaknesses, essentially enhancing their cybersecurity posture.
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