Red Teaming

Simulate Real World Attack Scenarios

Red teaming is a group of whitehat hackers who run penetration testing on a system to find any weaknesses in infrastructure, software, user training, and other resources connected to the network.

Scenarios similar to real-world attacks are used to determine corporate resilience across network, application and physical controls. The results will reveal all types of vulnerabilities including physical, application, networking, and human factors.

With a Red Teaming exercise, some attacks will be automated but mostly it’s a manual penetration test. Using this type of penetration testing, the organization gets a deep dive into its own cyber defenses against some of the best hackers.

Red Teaming and APT Emulation Similarities

Red Teaming has some similarities to APT emulation, but it also has some differences that make it a beneficial addition to enterprise cyber security penetration testing. With a Red Team exercise, whitehat hackers use similar tools and scenarios that would be found in the wild. They often emulate the same techniques that a real-world attacker would use to exploit a system. Red Teams often work with other teams (usually called a Blue Team) to find vulnerabilities. The Red Team emulates bad actors and threats typical to a cyber-security attack, and the other team must defend against their exploits.

Uncover Insider Threats

An important aspect of Red Teaming is uncovering insider threats. Insider threats involve malicious or unintentional human errors that could compromise private data. Human factors are a large part of some of today’s biggest data breaches, so a Red Team with social engineering techniques can greatly improve employee education in detecting an intruder’s attack.