Why Are Red and Blue Teams Important?
Companies face a wide and increasing range of cybersecurity threats. As cyberattacks grow more numerous and more sophisticated, the probability that an organization will experience an expensive and damaging cyberattack continues to rise. The growing use of automation, affiliate models, and the availability of advanced malware on the open market increases the probability that attackers will find and exploit any vulnerabilities in an organization’s systems.
Red and blue teams are important because they help an organization find and fix these vulnerabilities and security holes before they can be exploited by an attacker. Red teams use the same tools and techniques as real attackers to identify the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited. During these exercises, blue teams evaluate the organization’s defenses, enabling them to identify visibility and security gaps or develop new processes to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of threat detection and incident response.
What Is a Red Team?
A red team performs offensive cybersecurity assessments. They use pen testing tools and techniques to emulate how a real-world threat actor would investigate, exploit, and attack an organization. Red team attackers will use various tools and techniques to gain access to an organization’s systems. These range from social engineering attacks — such as phishing attacks — to the exploitation of vulnerabilities in public-facing applications.
From there, the role of the red team is to dive as deep into the organization’s network as possible by exploiting chains of discovered vulnerabilities. Often, these exercises have set goals or metrics for success such as gaining access to a particular computer or to sensitive information.
What Is a Blue Team?
A blue team sits on the other side of the cybersecurity exercise. Their purpose is to use the organization’s tools and processes to identify and respond to the attacks being performed by the red team. Blue team members are defensive specialists and can advise an organization’s internal security team on how to improve its defenses against various cyber threats. This includes both preventing attackers from breaching the network and more effectively detecting, containing, and remediating successful incursions.
Red Team vs Blue Team
In general, these two teams require different but related skill sets. Red team members are offensive specialists and experts with the tools required to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. They are skilled at identifying potential attack vectors and determining ways to chain vulnerabilities or security gaps together to deepen their access to an organization’s environment.
Blue teams, on the other hand, focus on defense. They specialize in monitoring security tools and analyzing event data to detect potential threats within an organization’s environment. Additionally, they know how to configure and use defensive security tools to block attacks from occurring or to contain and remediate an incident after it occurs.
How Do the Red Team and Blue Team Work Together?
While Red teams and blue teams operate on opposite sides of a cybersecurity exercise, they have complementary skills and goals. The red team is responsible for identifying vulnerabilities in an organization’s systems and processes by simulating a real-world attacker. On the other side, the blue team evaluates the effectiveness of an organization’s defenses and finds potential gaps by attempting to detect and remediate the red team’s attacks. At the end of the exercise, the red and blue teams will collaborate in a retrospective to identify what did and didn’t work and to identify potential room for improvement.
In some cases, the collaboration between the red and blue teams will go deeper in what is called a purple team exercise. A purple team combines the roles of the red and blue teams within a single team. This may include members moving between the red and blue teams to apply their skills on either side. This helps to ensure that both teams are up-to-date on the latest attacks (and how to defend against them) and defensive tools and best practices (and how to circumvent or defeat them).
Red Team and Blue Team Security with Check Point CRT
Red and blue team engagements can be invaluable for an organization’s cybersecurity. Both sides of the exercise can provide valuable information regarding an organization’s current security posture and recommendations on how the security team can make changes to improve its defenses and reduce the risk of cyberattacks.
Check Point’s portfolio of professional security services includes cybersecurity exercises performed by expert red and blue team members. For more information about scheduling an assessment, contact us.
Feedback