What is Red Teaming?
Red teaming is a process for testing the overall cybersecurity of organizations where a team of ethical hackers (security professionals) carry out a simulated and nondestructive cyberattack. The simulated cyberattack helps organizations identify vulnerabilities in its system and make improvements to security operations.
The goals of a Red Team attack are to understand how a real threat actor would act when attempting to gain access to a network and to analyze the attack surface to learn and identify the vulnerabilities so that they can be mitigated. The main goal is to understand security opertaions as a whole (people, processes, technology), and test the organization’s detection and response capabilities.
Red Team attacks leverage a particular set of tactics, techniqures, and procedures (TTPs) ti breach a newtork and steal data based on the security of the organization and it’s business.
Red Teaming goes beyond regular penetration testing, Red Teaming does not only focus on the technology but focuses on also people and processes in the simulated attacks.
There are 3 types of Red Team attacks:
- Cyber (Digital Attacks includes Web, Network, Cloud, etc)
- Social Attacks (Exploiting people’s behaviour)
- Physical (Attacks involving physical man-power)
Red Team attacks are similar to attacks used by real threat actors.
- Red Team Emulation - Copy attack techniques of threat actors
- Red Team Simulation - Mimics behaviour of threat actors
Red Teams try to compromise systems and get access to sensitive information in any way possible as quietly as possible leaving no footprints behind.
Penetration Testing vs Red Teaming
| Penetration Testing | Red Teaming | |
|---|---|---|
| Used to identify risks associated with exploitation of a target environment. | Process of using real-world TTPs employed by threat-actors having goals to measure the effectiveness of the people, technologies and procedures used to defend an environment. | |
| More emphasis on reducing exposed vulnerabilities. | More emphasis on Training and measuring risks and defence capabilities of an organization. | |
| Limited | Specific part of (or the entire) organization | |
| Make assumptions about the environment, may not test where it isn’t told to go. | Makes no assumptions attempts to compromise everywhere; pivots and changes strategy, techniques if/when needed. | |
| Uses Tools present at that time during testing | Constantly researching new exploits, vulnerabilities and implement attack with new tools as soon as discovered |
Benefits of Red Teaming
Red Teaming exercises help organizations get an threat actor’s perspective on their systems and test Blue Team to see how they would withstand a real world cyberattack. Provides an understanding of blue team’s capability to impact a threat’s ability to operate.