What Problems Does Red Teaming Solve?
Red team exercises are an excellent way to demonstrate cybersecurity resilience against known and unknown threats. A successful red team exercise might demonstrate that attackers can bypass seemingly robust security controls in unexpected ways.
This helps security leaders understand the value of cybersecurity expenditure and report on the success of their initiatives. Red team exercises can play out over a long period of time, with multiple stages simulating different phases of a real-world cyberattack.
Red Teaming vs. Penetration Testing
On the surface, red teaming looks very similar to traditional penetration testing. However there are some key differences between the two.
The main difference between red teaming and penetration testing is the goal-based structure of the exercise. Red teaming exercises have a specific goal in mind — like compromising a particular system or exfiltrating a specific file. This process can play out over several weeks at a time.
By comparison, penetration tests are designed to identify vulnerabilities threat actors might exploit. Pentesters may use those vulnerabilities in their research, but they typically won’t chain them together to achieve a specific goal.
As a result, red teaming is typically a costlier and more involved process than penetration testing. Most organizations only invest in red teaming after conducting penetration tests.
How Does Red Teaming Work?
Red team simulations follow a specific structure. A group of ethical hackers—the red team—will work against your organization’s security staff, called the blue team. Usually, the blue team is not informed the red team exercise is taking place.
The red team is made up of highly trained security experts with ethical hacking experience. Red teamers must understand and leverage the latest real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures to do this.
Unlike most other forms of security testing, red teams take a holistic view of the organization’s security posture. Like real-world threat actors, they look for vulnerabilities outside the strict limitations of the organization’s tech stack.
In general, red teamers are looking to chain together three kinds of vulnerabilities:
- Technological vulnerabilities like security misconfigurations, lack of visibility, and bad authentication policies. All vulnerabilities related to networks, applications, and hardware fall into this category.
- Social engineering vulnerabilities like insider threats, phishing attacks, account takeovers. These vulnerabilities typically rely on deceiving a human user in some way.
- Infrastructure vulnerabilities include compromising physical access control at the organization and leveraging third-party supply chain attacks.
Combining these vulnerabilities together can identify risks that traditional penetration tests overlook. The exercise can also help security leaders quantify potential damages in specific terms with dollar values.
Who Should Invest in Red Teaming?
Most organizations invest in red teaming exercises after developing, implementing, and testing security infrastructure. It is best-suited to organizations with mature security controls and policies.
Red team initiatives can help organizations with complex IT infrastructure meet strict compliance requirements. There are three main requirements that red team exercises can meet:
- Continuous monitoring. Red teaming services enable organizations to continuously monitor security controls against new and evolving threats. This helps meet continuous monitoring requirements like those stipulated in FedRAMP.
- Identification of weaknesses. Some regulatory frameworks like PCI-DSS require organizations to systematically identify and remediate security vulnerabilities. Red teams excel at identifying vulnerabilities and providing guidance on how to remediate them.
- Incident response readiness. Compliance frameworks like SOC 2 stipulate specific controls and workflows for incident response. Red team operations give organizations a chance to prove their incident response processes meet those requirements.
4 Benefits of Red Teaming to Meet Compliance Requirements
Red team vendors help organizations achieve strict compliance requirements in four key ways:
- Discover hidden vulnerabilities. Red teaming exercises are designed to uncover vulnerabilities that other tests do not. Simulating sophisticated threat scenarios helps organizations discover vulnerabilities before malicious threat actors do.
- Receive custom-tailored security assessments. Red teaming helps organizations identify specific vulnerabilities in their security posture and understand the damage that a successful attack could cause. This helps drive security awareness among company leadership and simplifies reporting.
- Keep up with changing regulatory standards. Regulations change over time, and keeping up with those changes can be a challenge. Red teaming helps security leaders stay on top of version updates to compliance frameworks like PCI-DSS 4.0
- Earn reputable third-party validation. Some regulatory frameworks require an authorized third party to conduct security tests. Authorized red team services are an ideal solution for organizations that need to partner with FedRAMP 3PAOs or other authorized testing vendors.
Challenges to Conducting Red Teaming Exercises
Red teaming is a valuable exercise for achieving best-in-class security performance, but it can also come with drawbacks. Some of the things security leaders should be aware of before investing in red team initiatives include:
- Testing is resource intensive. Red team exercises are generally more expensive than penetration tests. Not all organizations can afford to dedicate the resources necessary to comprehensive red team testing.
- Red team exercises need specific objectives. Choosing the appropriate scope for a red teaming exercise is rarely easy. Security leaders must clearly communicate the organization’s goals and identify objectives that help meet those goals, especially conducting red team exercises for compliance.
- Red team operations can disrupt business operations. Although red teamers don’t want to cause business downtime, it can happen. This is especially true of organizations with automated security policies that haven’t been fine-tuned effectively.
- There are privacy and legal concerns. These operations involve accessing sensitive data, often including customer and financial information. Legal and privacy concerns must be proactively addressed before any red teaming operation begins.
Test Your Security Resilience with Novawatch
Novawatch helps security leaders uncover hidden vulnerabilities and improve cyber resilience with dedicated red team services. Find out how our team of offensive security experts can help you mitigate risk in your organization.
