What is Red Teaming, Tactics & How Does it Works?

You might have heard about Red Teaming, but you might be wondering what it is all about. It is a practice of security testing for your system through which you can try to hack. The red team can be externally contracted in a group of pentesters in your organization. The red teaming central role is to evaluate the malicious actor genuinely and try to break into the system.

The Red team value can be like imagining a fictional scenario. Organizations are extremely well-developed through the pentesting process and it gives the confidence the external actor cannot breach the system. The Red team will realize this and will take the direct approach, which includes employee access cards, walking to the building, training staff, and telling them that they are “from IT”. Maximum helpful employees will give them access where you can copy and walk out with the sensitive data.

The moto of red teaming is to cover up cognitive errors like groupthink, and confirmation bias, and these can impair the decision-making ability of the organization or any individual. If the company has a blue team, then it does not require much red team. This is a very purposeful decision where you can compare the active and passive systems of any agency.

Red teaming mainly originated from the military and real strength and quality of strategy which is used by the external perspective. Red teaming has common cybersecurity training, which mostly uses by the private and public sectors. This type of security testing includes penetration testing and ethical hacking. The red team always shares the same goal and perspective with these strategies, but the execution is quite different.

What are the common Red Teaming Tactics?

The red team’s main work is to uncover the risk of your organization with the traditional penetration test. They can only focus on aspects or narrow scope. Here we will discuss a few common Red Team tactics:

1. Email and phone-based social engineering: When you do a bit of research regarding the organization that time phishing emails are very much convincing. This type of low-hanging fruit can make the composite attack, which leads to the goal.
2. Network service exploitation: It can exploit the unpatched or misconfigured network to provide the attacker access to inaccessible networks for sensitive information. Many time attacker will leave the persistent back door for the future, if they need access at that time, they try to use that.
3. Physically facility exploitation: Everyone will have a natural inclination so they can avoid confrontation. For gaining access to a secure facility, they can easily follow someone through the door. Users can use the door that they have opened for the last time.
4. Application layer exploitation: Whenever an attacker sees the organization’s network perimeter, they think about the web application. Here you can exploit the web application vulnerabilities, which they can execute for further attack.

Red Teaming Benefits:

Red Teaming has many benefits but those all work at the broadest level so this is a very big thing. It has a comprehensive picture of cybersecurity within your organization. Those benefits are discussed below:

1. It identifies the risk and suspects of the attack, whichever comes against the key business information.
2. It stimulates the techniques and procedure of the genuine threat where the actor has to manage the risk and control that in a specific manner.
3. You need to access the organization’s ability to detect, prevent, and respond to sophisticated targeted threats.
4. It also encourages close engagement, which includes internal incident response. Here blue team provides meaningful mitigation, which can have a comprehensive post-assessment of the debriefing workshop.

How does Red Teaming Work?

If you want to know how the red teamwork, then you need to follow down, there are a few stages:

1. The Organisation needs to agree to work with the red team to complete their goal for the exercise. This is an extraction of sensitive information from a particular server.
2. Red Team will perform reconnaissance after the target. As a result, it will map the target system, including network service, employee portal, and web apps.
3. The vulnerability has to be found in the target system, and it will typically get leveraged by using the XSS or phishing techniques.
4. As soon as the valid access token gets secure, the red team uses the access of further vulnerability.
5. Whenever you will get the valid access token, and you feel that is secure, your red team will seek to escalate the access level which is required to access the target.
6. As soon as it achieved, you must understand that the target data or asses are reached.

What all are involved in Red Team Engagement?

To get maximum output from the Red Team exercise, you need to prepare yourself carefully. Different organizations act differently way and the high-quality red team exercise will be specifically tailored toward vulnerabilities in your system. Here you will get a few factors that are important to understand for you; those are below:

1. Know what you are looking for: It is very important that you must understand which process you want to test. It is very much possible that you use web application testing, but you do not need to have any deep sense of where your other system is integrated with your web app. It is important that you understand your own system and patch the vulnerabilities before starting with the red team exercise.
2. Know your network: It is regarding the tip on which you focus, and the technical specification of the network. It is always better to quantify the test environment to become more accurate and specify the red team.
3. Know your budget: Red team can work on various levels, but it can make the full-spectrum simulated attack in your network, which includes social engineering, physical intrusion, etc. it can be expensive too. This is why it is very important to understand how you spend your red ream exercise and set the scope accordingly.
4. Know your risk level: There are few organizations that can able to tolerate the high level of risk and the standard of the business procedure. There are few working industries that do detailed and complex compliance requirements. We need to limit the risk level to a greater degree. As soon as you conduct the red team exercise it is important to focus on the risk that actually presents your business’s consequences.

Final thought

This Red team helps you to grow your business, so adopting this can be your best decision. You can also take the best Certified Red Team Expert course – Complete Training With Real-World Attacks to learn the best red team skills.