Red Team

A red team engagement/assessment is a realistic adversary simulation that tests an organization's entire security posture, including people, processes, and technology.

Red teams use stealth and persistence to mimic advanced attackers.

Goal: To simulate real-world advanced attacks and assess the organization's ability to detect, respond, and recover from complex threats.

Limitation: It requires significant time, resources, and organizational buy-in to be effective. It is less about finding specific vulnerabilities and more about a holistic assessment.

Activities involved:

• Long-Term Planning: simulate Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) of advanced threat actors.

• Reconnaissance: perform extended recon, gathering information about employees, systems, and physical locations.

• Multiple Attack Vectors: combine social engineering, physical security breaches, and technical exploits, such as phishing campaigns, to compromise employee credentials.

• Stealth and Persistence: focus on avoiding detection while maintaining access over time.

• Comprehensive Assessment: test all aspects of the organization's defense, including blue teams (defenders), incident response processes, technical systems, and remediation and recovery measures.

• Reporting and Feedback: deliver a report outlining strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in detection and defense.

Also known as ethical hacking, simulates an attack on an application, system, or network to actively exploit vulnerabilities.

Goal: Test real-world scenarios, evaluate exploitability, and measure an organization's detection and response capabilities.

Limitation: Testing typically has a defined scope and time limit, so they do not simulate persistent, long-term attacks.

Activities involved:

• Reconnaissance: gather information about the target system (IP ranges, domains, open ports, employee information, exposed data breaches, etc).

• Scanning: identify potential weaknesses using tools like Nmap, Burp Suite, etc.

• Exploitation: actively exploit (validate they can be exploited) identified vulnerabilities, e.g., SQL injection, weak passwords, unpatched software, etc.

• Post-Exploitation: assess what can be done after gaining access, e.g., lateral movement, privilege escalation, data exfiltration, etc.

• Reporting: provide a detailed account of findings, including proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits and recommendations.

A red team engagement/assessment is a realistic adversary simulation that tests an organization's entire security posture, including people, processes, and technology.

Red teams use stealth and persistence to mimic advanced attackers.

Goal: To simulate real-world advanced attacks and assess the organization's ability to detect, respond, and recover from complex threats.

Limitation: It requires significant time, resources, and organizational buy-in to be effective. It is less about finding specific vulnerabilities and more about a holistic assessment.

Activities involved:

• Long-Term Planning: simulate Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) of advanced threat actors.

• Reconnaissance: perform extended recon, gathering information about employees, systems, and physical locations.

• Multiple Attack Vectors: combine social engineering, physical security breaches, and technical exploits, such as phishing campaigns, to compromise employee credentials.

• Stealth and Persistence: focus on avoiding detection while maintaining access over time.

• Comprehensive Assessment: test all aspects of the organization's defense, including blue teams (defenders), incident response processes, technical systems, and remediation and recovery measures.

• Reporting and Feedback: deliver a report outlining strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in detection and defense.