Red teaming is a term borrowed from the military. In military exercises, a group would take the role of a red team to simulate attack techniques to test the reaction capabilities of a defending team, generally known as blue team, against known adversary strategies. Translated into the world of cybersecurity, red team engagements consist of emulating a real threat actor’s Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) so that we can measure how well our blue team responds to them and ultimately improve any security controls in place.
The aim of the Red Team is to attack the organisation and break through their security infrastructure. This tests how the Blue Team (Security Operation Center) faces the attack. This differs from the penetration testing in which the main goal is to find the highest possible number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Red Team is much more time consuming as it simulates a real and coordinated attack to break through the security systems of the organization to reach its valuable assets without being noticed by the Blue Team. The main focus of Red Team is to test the effectiveness of the Blue Team – its flaws and ability to respond to a possible attack.
Every red team engagement will start by defining clear goals, ranging from compromising a given critical host to stealing some sensitive information from the target. Usually, the blue team won’t be informed of such exercises to avoid introducing any biases in their analysis. The red team will do everything they can to achieve the goals while remaining undetected and evading any existing security mechanisms like firewalls, antivirus, EDR, IPS and others.
Red team engagements also improve on regular penetration tests by considering several attack surfaces:
- Technical Infrastructure: Like in a regular penetration test, a red team will try to uncover technical vulnerabilities, with a much higher emphasis on stealth and evasion.
- Social Engineering: Targeting people through phishing campaigns, phone calls or social media to trick them into revealing information that should be private.
- Physical Intrusion: Using techniques like lockpicking, RFID cloning, exploiting weaknesses in electronic access control devices to access restricted areas of facilities.
What we offer
The Red Team’s main goal is to gain valuable assets of the organisation, such as access to internal systems and databases without being discovered. The process can be divided into several phases. Firstly, obtaining the information. Secondly, the targeted attack, persistence and exfiltration of sensitive data. The effort to break through the security is in the form of a black box test and uses all pre-approved and also technically feasible options, such as physical access to the company, cyber-attacks, social engineering and much more. The whole process of obtaining the assets as well as the methods used to avoid being detected by the Blue Team are documented in the final report.
Benefits
- The most sophisticated way to simulate a targeted attack
- The most realistic test of resistance against an attack conducted by professionals
- Recommendations on how to secure critical assets in the best possible way
If you are interested to get a quote, contact us. An online meeting will be arranged to estimate the total cost.
