Red Team / Blue Team
Red Team / Blue Team
In a red team/blue team exercise, the red team is made up of offensive security experts who try to attack an organization’s cybersecurity defenses. The blue team defends against and responds to the red team attack.
Modeled after military training exercises, this drill is a face-off between two teams of highly trained cybersecurity professionals: a red team that uses real-world adversary tradecraft in an attempt to compromise the environment, and a blue team that consists of incident responders who work within the security unit to identify, assess and respond to the intrusion.
In a red team/blue team cybersecurity simulation, the red team acts as an adversary, attempting to identify and exploit potential weaknesses within the organization’s cyber defenses using sophisticated attack techniques. These offensive teams typically consist of highly experienced security professionals or independent ethical hackers who focus on penetration testing by imitating real-world attack techniques and methods.
The red team gains initial access usually through the theft of user credentials or social engineering techniques. Once inside the network, the red team elevates its privileges and moves laterally across systems with the goal of progressing as deeply as possible into the network, exfiltrating data while avoiding detection.
If the red team is playing offense, then the blue team is on defense. Typically, this group consists of incident response consultants who provide guidance to the IT security team on where to make improvements to stop sophisticated types of cyberattacks and threats. The IT security team is then responsible for maintaining the internal network against various types of risk.
While many organizations consider prevention the gold standard of security, detection and remediation are equally important to overall defense capabilities. One key metric is the organization’s “breakout time” — the critical window between when an intruder compromises the first machine and when they can move laterally to other systems on the network.
CrowdStrike typically recommends a “1-10-60 rule,” which means that organizations should be able to detect an intrusion in under a minute, assess its risk level within 10 minutes and eject the adversary in less than one hour.