Blue Team Objectives
The blue team is often composed of an organization’s security team. During the engagement and outside of it, its objective is to protect the organization against cyber threats. At times, a blue team will be unaware that the company is undergoing a cybersecurity assessment and will believe that the simulated attacks are real-world threats. Whether or not the blue team is aware of the exercise, its role is to respond just like the organization would to a real attack.
The Importance of the Blue Team
The blue team is an organization’s security team. It is responsible for protecting the company against cyber threats, whether real or simulated.
The blue team is a crucial component of an organization’s security program since it often is the company’s security team or security operations center (SOC). Often, during a security test, the blue team is unaware that the test is going on to ensure that the engagement is as accurate as possible. This means that the security team will respond to simulated attacks just like real world ones.
Blue Team Skill Set
A blue team’s skill set will focus on the defensive side of cybersecurity with a focus on preventing, identifying, and responding to potential threats. Some of the key skills that should exist on a blue team include the following:
- Security Planning: A blue team is responsible for developing an organization’s security strategy. The SOC should be able to develop and implement a security strategy that provides effective protection against various cyber threats.
- Threat Analysis: The blue team will identify and respond to threats to an organization’s systems. This requires the ability to analyze the information provided by security tools and correctly triage and respond to security incidents.
- System Hardening: Many systems are insecure by default. System hardening involves configuring these systems to make them more difficult to exploit.
Blue Team vs. Red Team
The blue team is an organization’s security team. It is responsible for protecting the organization against simulated attacks during a cybersecurity test.
The red team is the offensive side of the engagement that carries out these attacks. The goal of the red team is to accurately emulate real-world threats that an organization may face and test the organization’s defenses against them. These simulations may be of general security threats or focus on the tools and techniques used by a particular threat actor. Often, the red team will use the MITRE ATT&CK framework and similar tools to plan their attacks and ensure good coverage of potential threats to the organization.
How Does the Blue/Red Team Security Testing Process Work?
Often, the blue team will not be informed about the fact that a security testing process is occurring. However, someone in the organization — potentially including a representative from the security team — will meet with the red team to define the terms of engagement. This might include the scope of systems included in the test, the tools and techniques that can be used, and other logistics — such as how the engagement will end and how to handle the situation if the red team is caught by the (unaware) blue team.
Once agreements are in place, the red team can start testing an organization’s security. This is the first time that the blue team will be aware of the engagement, but they should interpret it as a real-world attack. The red team will use various techniques to try to gain access to the target systems, and the blue team will respond like they would to a real-world attack.
After the test is complete, all parties will perform a retrospective where the blue team officially becomes aware of the exercise. During this retrospective, the red team will present their findings, and all participants can analyze the effectiveness of the blue team’s defenses and identify potential opportunities for improvement.
Blue Team Security with Check Point CRT
Regular security testing is essential to ensuring that an organization’s defenses are effective against the latest cyber threats. Red team testing can simulate real-world attacks and determine how the blue team would respond in real-world scenarios.
Check Point offers red teaming services and blue team consulting as part of its portfolio of professional services. To learn more about how Check Point can help evaluate and improve your organization’s cybersecurity or to schedule an engagement, contact us.
Feedback