What Is a Red Team?

A red team is a group of trusted security professionals who test an organization’s cyber defenses and security protocols by simulating real-world attacks. They understand how hackers operate and use the same techniques and methodology to achieve their objectives. The fundamental goal of a red team is to find weaknesses and vulnerabilities in any system that malicious actors can potentially use. This process of finding security issues and reporting them to the organization is known as red teaming.

The red team works at the behest of the organization and can be employees of the firm or outside ethical hackers. The name “red team” originates from the military war games in which nations test their operational plans and strategies by asking a group to act as an adversary and get past their defenses. This adversarial group is known as the red team.

How Do Red Teams Work?

Red teams are given a specific objective, such as disrupting a service, accessing sensitive assets, planting malware, or compromising a particular account. These objectives are unknown to the people managing the organization’s cybersecurity, which is also sometimes known as the blue team.

The red team can use any means necessary to reach their goal. But they don’t cause actual harm or steal data. Most red teaming exercises use a structured process, including planning, execution, reporting, and debriefing.

Some common methods of infiltration used by red teams include social engineering, exploiting unpatched or misconfigured network services, gaining physical access to secure facilities, hijacking web applications, and more. These methods help them get through to the organization’s systems without alerting the security team or triggering its intrusion detection systems.

They can also use tools and services like proxies, VPNs, and encryption to mask their identity and location.

Red teaming provides several benefits to any organization and is a crucial part of its cybersecurity. Most importantly, it helps organizations assess their security posture from a hacker or malicious actor’s perspective and answer questions like:

• How easy is it to breach the organization’s security and access its network or services?
• How efficient or adept is the organization in detecting or responding to a cyberattack?
• How much damage can an attacker cause to the organization’s systems?
• And how quickly can the organization recover from the attack?

So red teaming can highlight the organization’s vulnerabilities and the efficacy of its security protocols and systems. Plus, it can help build employee awareness about security and best practices, and improve communication between the organization’s cybersecurity team and other stakeholders.

Like red teaming, penetration testing is a security test that can help an organization prepare for threats. But each has different methods, scopes, and goals.

Penetration testing is used to discover as many vulnerabilities and weaknesses as possible in a specific network, service, system, or website within a set time and scope. Security professionals test the system and find out how weak it is. Penetration testing is done with prior knowledge of the organization’s cybersecurity team. It’s also often required by regulations and standards, such as FDIC, PCI DSS, and HIPAA security compliance.

On the other hand, red teaming is more about simulating a real-world attack, and it’s not constrained by time or limits. Red teams are also given a specific objective. But they don’t need to find all security vulnerabilities; they just need one way to reach their goal. Additionally, as explained earlier, a red team can use various methods, including social engineering and physical infiltration, to achieve their goal, and have complete freedom over the methods and pathways.

A Valuable Cybersecurity Tool

Red teaming is a valuable tool in any institution or organization’s arsenal to assess its cybersecurity and find out weaknesses to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. It’s effective because red teams think like an attacker and aren’t limited by time or methods to find their way in.