With the ever-increasing threat of data breaches for many organisations, testing your security systems is the only way to find vulnerabilities. When discussing cyber security tests, the terms “Red Team” and “Blue Team” are often mentioned. In this article, we will cover what the two teams are, their roles and how they work together to improve an organisation’s security posture.
So, what is the difference between red and blue team testing? The Red Team is made up of offensive attackers, who use “ethical hacking” to find weaknesses in an organisation’s cyber security defences. The aim of the Blue Team is to defend the organisation from the Red Team’s attacks, by ensuring security measures are implemented and attacks are responded to appropriately.
Read on to find out more about common Red and Blue Team exercises, and how they can work together to provide a holistic approach to cyber security.
In this Blog Post You Will Find:
- How Do Red and Blue Teams Differ?
- How Do Red and Blue Teams Work Together?
- What do Red Team Testing Exercises Include?
- The Red Team Arsenal
- What do Blue Team Exercises Include?
- The Blue Team Arsenal
- Do You Need Red Team Testing?
- What If You Don’t Have a Blue Team?
- Get Red Team Testing for Your Organisation
How Do Red and Blue Teams Differ?
Red Teams are often external entities brought in to test the effectiveness of an organisation’s security. The Red Team carries out various cyber-attacks to identify security flaws and test the IT defence strategy. The Blue Team refers to the internal department that is responsible for defending the business from a cyber attack, by ensuring security risks are managed and the correct defences are put into place.
How Do Red and Blue Teams Work Together?
Red and Blue Teams are two critical components in the world of cyber security. While they seem like opposing forces, their collaboration is crucial for effective threat detection and response. In this synergy, communication is the key to achieving successful outcomes. The Blue Team is responsible for constantly maintaining and improving an organisation’s security posture. Typically, they stay abreast of the latest technologies, trends, and best practices in cybersecurity. This knowledge can be shared with the Red Team, enabling them to understand the organisation’s security landscape better and identify potential threats.
The Blue Team may also leverage insights from the Red Team regarding new threats, penetration techniques and hacking methodologies. This information can be used to refine better security controls, improve detection capabilities and enhance overall defences. When conducting a test or exercise, it is essential for the Red Team to share their plans with the Blue Team lead, ensuring that the organisation is well prepared for the simulated attack scenario. This transparency allows the Blue Team to develop an effective response strategy.
Upon completing the test, both teams gather insights and report on their findings. The Red Team provides feedback on successful breaches and offers advice on preventing similar attacks in real-world scenarios. Similarly, the Blue Team shares information about their monitoring procedures’ effectiveness in detecting attempted attacks.
The ultimate goal of this partnership is to develop and implement stronger security controls as needed. Both teams work together to identify vulnerabilities, refine detection methods, and enhance overall defences. Through open communication channels, a willingness to learn from each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and a commitment to continuous improvement – this partnership can create a truly powerful synergy that drives excellence in cyber security.
What do Red Team Testing Exercises Include?
The Red Team works against the Blue Team to gain access to sensitive data within an organisation and to identify flaws in mature security systems. This is done using a few different techniques:
Social Engineering
Staff members are often seen as the ‘weakest link’ when it comes to the organisation’s security. There are a lot of weaknesses found in human nature, most of which can be exploited by hackers to gain access to important information. Social engineering could include phishing emails, impersonation and USB drops that could contain malicious code.
To mitigate the risk of staff being exploited, encourage a positive security culture within your business, and train your staff on how to spot social engineering attacks. If you want to learn more about Social Engineering, read our recent blog, where we discuss four principles of social engineering and which attacks can be attributed to these principles.
Penetration Testing
It’s important to understand the difference between a Red Team Test and a standard penetration test. Security penetration testing uses the methodology of identifying and attempting to exploit security weaknesses associated with an organisation’s technology systems. This sounds similar to Red Team testing, however, the test is based on agreed testing limitations and does not involve testing your people and processes. A Red Team test is often stealthier, not limited to one area of data, and is often played out over an extended period to gather a larger amount of sensitive information.
Penetration testing engagements are often confused with Red Team testing. For more information on the difference between these two security testing measures, read our recent blog post.
Physical Intrusion
Cyber attacks don’t just use remote methods to gather vital information; attackers may visit your business premises too. There are a few methods of doing this, which could include lock picking or disabling security alarms. The easiest, and most common, is tailgating. This simply means a hacker taking advantage of an open door, which is often held open by an employee entering the premises after a break.
Once a hacker is inside, they can access sensitive information by checking for notes and documents left in meeting rooms and on desks, and shoulder surfing oblivious employees while they access internal business systems.
The Red Team Arsenal
When it comes to conducting offensive penetration tests, Red Team relies on a carefully curated arsenal of cutting-edge cyber security tools. These utilities are well-known to security professionals and real hackers – which enable them to simulate realistic attacks, test defences, and identify vulnerabilities in an organisation’s IT infrastructure.
Hacking Operating Systems: Kali Linux and Parrot OS, are two industry-leading operating systems designed specifically for penetration testing and digital forensics. These platforms provide a comprehensive toolkit with hundreds of tools for simulating attacks, identifying vulnerabilities, analysing network traffic and much more.
Web Application Exploitation Tools: Burp, Sqlmap, and Nikto are go-to tools for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications. By leveraging these tools, Red Team can target common web application flaws, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).
Network Exploitation Tools: CrackMapExec, Mimikatz, and Sshuttle allow the exploitation of network vulnerabilities, such as weak authentication mechanisms and unpatched systems. By leveraging these tools, it is possible to simulate real-world attacks that target common network-based weaknesses.
Network Manipulation Tools: Aircrack-ng, Responder, Ettercap and Bettercap enable interception and manipulation of network traffic – allowing to simulate man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and testing against common network-based threats.
Privilege Escalation Tools: PowerUp, and LinPEAS help us elevate privileges on compromised systems, enabling us to gain deeper access to sensitive data and networks. These tools are essential for simulating advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks and testing for privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
Password Cracking Tools: John the Ripper, Hashcat and Hydra to crack passwords and test password policies. These tools allow for the simulation of brute-force attacks and identify weaknesses in authentication mechanisms.
Command & Control (C2) Tool: Cobalt Strike, Empire and Covenant are the key frameworks for conducting advanced penetration tests and simulating C2 attacks. These tools are used to establish command and control channels with compromised systems, execute payloads, and test an organisation’s protection against more sophisticated attack vectors.
Social Engineering Tools: Social Engineering Toolkit (SET), Beef, and EvilGinx2 are used to simulate social engineering attacks that exploit human psychology. By leveraging these tools, it is possible to test an employees’ awareness and susceptibility to phishing, pretexting, or other types of social engineering attacks.
Evasion Tools: Veil and Evilgrade enable us to evade detection by intrusion detection systems (IDS) and network-based security controls. These tools help us simulate real-world attacks that aim to evade detection and maintain a persistent presence on the target system.
By using these powerful cyber security tools, Red Team can conduct advanced penetration tests that simulate realistic cyber-attacks, test defences and identify vulnerabilities in an organisation’s IT infrastructure.
What do Blue Team Exercises Include?
A Blue Team is an organisation’s cyber security personnel, who carry out a variety of tasks to help protect against real-world cyber attacks:
Implementing Security Measures
The team is responsible for ensuring the whole organisation, including staff and other personnel, takes the correct precautions for protecting data that could be used to access the system. Automated systems may be used to stop common threats, such as malware and phishing emails. The Blue Team could work to add human intelligence to these tools, to make them more sophisticated and decrease the risks of security breaches.
Identify Security Flaws
The Blue Team oversees vulnerability management by regularly running internal scans for flaws in the organisation’s security system. The blue team is responsible for maintaining the security perimeter, triaging threats and enacting defined incident response procedures.
Defend Against Cyber Attacks
Blue Teams are the main line of defence when a cyber-attack happens. The team is responsible for spotting the attack in real-time and taking the best course of action to stop hackers from gaining access to sensitive information.
The team works at a rapid pace to shut down any form of compromise. The Blue Team then uses Red Team test attacks to identify vulnerabilities in the system and make appropriate updates to ensure these are fixed.
The Blue Team Arsenal
As part of the defence strategy, the Blue Team relies on a robust arsenal of cutting-edge tools to detect, prevent, and respond to potential security threats. These powerful utilities allow monitoring networks, systems, and applications for malicious activity, identifying vulnerabilities, and taking proactive measures to protect against cyber-attacks.
Network Security Tools: Blue Team typically use Snort and Suricata, two advanced intrusion detection systems (IDS) that detect and prevent known and unknown threats in real-time. These tools provide critical visibility into network traffic and allow to respond quickly to security threats.
Endpoint Security Tools: CrowdStrike Falcon, ClamAV, Microsoft Defender and SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) are often used to protect endpoints from cyber threats. These tools provide real-time visibility into endpoint activity, detect known and unknown malware, and respond quickly to security incidents.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Tools: Blue Team employs a range of SIEM solutions, including Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic Security, Wazuh and others, to collect, monitor, and analyse log data from various sources. These tools are used to identify patterns and anomalies, detect security incidents, and take proactive measures to prevent attacks.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Tools: Tools like Okta and Microsoft IAM are often used to manage identities and access controls. These tools help us ensure that only authorised users have access to sensitive data and systems.
Cloud Security Tools: Blue Team employs Qualys, Zscalar and Delinea to secure cloud environments and protect against cyber threats. These tools provide critical visibility into cloud activity, enabling us to detect and respond quickly to security incidents.
Infrastructure Security Testing Tools: In this category, we can find Nessus and Acunetix which are used to test infrastructure’s security posture and identify vulnerabilities. These tools provide critical visibility into a live IT environment, enabling to take proactive measures and prevent attacks.
Forensics Tools: Volatility, Autopsy and Foremost are typically used for digital forensics investigations. These powerful tools help to analyse and reconstruct cyber-attacks, identifying the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers.
Reverse Engineering Tools: Blue Team uses Ghidra, Binary Ninja and Radare2 to reverse engineer malware and understand how it works. This knowledge allows for the development of effective countermeasures and improvement of the overall security posture.
Malware Analysis Tools: The most well-known tools are VirusTotal, REMnux, and YARA for malware analysis and detection. These tools help to identify and classify malicious code, to take targeted actions and to prevent malware execution.
By leveraging such a comprehensive suite of cybersecurity tools, Blue Team is able to detect, prevent, and respond to a wide range of security threats, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the organisation’s sensitive data and systems.
Do You Need Red Team Testing?
If you have systems that store or process sensitive data, then Red Team testing is necessary. Sensitive data could refer to any information that could be of value to someone — payment card data, company accounts, or personal information of users, for example.
Red Team testing should be used within organisations that consider themselves to have a mature cyber security posture, or where a large attack could result in a substantial financial loss, reputational damage or legal consequences.
What If You Don’t Have a Blue Team?
Let’s remember the objective of performing Red Team Testing – to verify the effectiveness of the security controls implemented in the organisation’s people, processes, facilities, and technology.
Blue Team activities could identify and respond to cyber attacks conducted by the Red Team, but other potential attacks, such as people and processes, are still left open. The Red Team will be able to identify these weaknesses, even if a Blue Team isn’t present within the organisation.
If you want to find out more information on this common query, read our recent blog – Should You Conduct Red Team Testing Without a Blue Team?
Get Red Team Testing for Your Organisation
While Red and Blue Teams work well together to provide a holistic view of your organisation’s security stack, a Red Team can work independently to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities. If your organisation deals with sensitive information that needs to be kept safe, implementing Red Team testing is the only way to be certain of your security efforts.
Risk Crew can design and deliver a systematic Red Teaming engagement to test the security controls in your organisation. Get a great return on investment for your cyber security testing budget by getting in touch with our qualified experts.