What is red teaming?

Red teaming tests your cybersecurity effectiveness by removing defender bias and adopting an adversarial perspective to evaluate your organization. It involves ethical hackers authorized by your organization to emulate real attackers' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) against your systems. It is a security risk assessment service that your organization can use to proactively identify and remediate IT security gaps and weaknesses.

A red team leverages attack simulation methodology. They simulate the actions of sophisticated attackers (or advanced persistent threats) to determine how well your organization’s people, processes and technologies could resist an attack that aims to achieve a specific objective.

Vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are two other security testing services designed to look into all known vulnerabilities within your network and test for ways to exploit them. In short, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests are useful for identifying technical flaws, while red team exercises provide actionable insights into the state of your overall IT security posture.

The importance of red teaming

By conducting red-teaming exercises, your organization can see how well your defenses would withstand a real-world cyberattack.

Benefits of red teaming

An effective way to figure out what is and is not working when it comes to controls, solutions and even personnel is to pit them against a dedicated adversary.

Red teaming offers a powerful way to assess your organization’s overall cybersecurity performance. It gives you and other security leaders a true-to-life assessment of how secure your organization is. Red teaming can help your business:

Identify and assess vulnerabilities

Evaluate security investments

Test threat detection and response capabilities

Encourage a culture of continuous improvement

Prepare for unknown security risks

Stay one step ahead of attackers

Penetration Testing vs. Red Teaming

Red teaming and penetration testing (often called pen testing) are terms that are often used interchangeably but are completely different.

The main objective of penetration tests is to identify exploitable vulnerabilities and gain access to a system. On the other hand, in a red-team exercise, the goal is to access specific systems or data by emulating a real-world adversary and using tactics and techniques throughout the attack chain, including privilege escalation and exfiltration.

How Does Red Teaming Work?

Once the agreement is done, the following are the phases of red teaming opted for by all the Red Teams:

1. Information Gathering or Reconnaissance

The Red Team process begins with reconnaissance where team members collect all the required information about the target. This information comprises of:

Personal details like identities, email addresses, contact numbers, etc. of the employees,

Details of open ports or services, hosting provider, and external network IP range,

API endpoints, mobile or web-based applications,

Previously breached credentials, and

Any other IoT or embedded system present in the infrastructure of the company.

2. Planning and Mapping of the attack

Once the Red Team gains knowledge about the system, they map the types of cyberattacks that will be launched and the approach of their execution. The factors that these teams consider include:

Determining subdomains hidden from public access,

Misconfigurations in the cloud-based infrastructure of the client,

Checking for weak or default credentials,

The risks that exist in the network or the web-based applications and,

Possible exploitation tactics for all the discovered weaknesses.

3. Execution of the attack and Penetration Testing

The vast amount of information collected in the previous phases act as the base for all the attacks targeting the system. These attacks target the services through:

previously mapped security issues,

compromising the systems used to develop applications,

access of servers in the system using leaked credentials or brute force approach,

target the employees who are using social engineering methodologies, and

attack the client-side applications.

4. Reporting and Documentation

Reporting is the final and the most crucial part of the entire red team process as it analyzes and understands the outcomes of the Red Team assessment. The report ideally contains a description of the types of cyberattacks conducted and their impact on the system. It lists the previously unknown security risks and vulnerabilities discovered during the procedure.

What Are Some Common Red Teaming techniques?

Some of the common red team techniques include,

Application Pentesting:

Application pentesting refers to the process of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities within applications such as web or mobile applications and their APIs to understand the impact of present vulnerabilities. This process helps with its fast remediation thus reducing the chances of an actual attack.

Social Engineering:

This refers to exploits carried out on people to try and obtain sensitive information such as passwords or access keys from them through manipulation. Social engineering is usually carried out through phishing scams, or by providing falsified information.

Physical Security Checks:

These are checks conducted on the physical premises of an asset or its company to see how well-maintained its physical security is. Testers try to overcome the placed physical security controls to gain access to the workstations and systems of employees.

Network Security Testing:

Here, the networks on which various assets within an organization operates is checked thoroughly for any vulnerabilities that might leave it susceptible to an attack resulting in data breach, loss of theft.

What is the Red Team Methodology?

Unlike a traditional penetration test, the red team model allows for the testing of the entire security scope of an organization including people, processes, and technology. The three major Red Team phrases used during the assessment to accurately emulate a realistic threat include ‘Get In’, ‘Stay In’, and ‘Act’.

Red Teams can use several types of tests and processes to accomplish their goals. However, the Red Team Methodology remains the same for all scenarios. This starts with establishing the rules of engagement with the client by defining the scope and goals, the kind of attack methods such as social engineering and cyber-attacks, and finally, listing the exceptions that would be left out of the process.

Redteaming Certifications

GIAC Red Team Professional (GRTP)

Certified Red Team Professional (CRTP)

Certified Red Team Operator (CRTO)

Certified Red Team Expert (CRTE)

MRT - Certified Red Teamer

Red Teaming Tools

Metasploit

Cobalt Strike

BloodHound

Empire

Mimikatz

Burp Suite

Nmap

Aircrack-ng

John the Ripper