Traditional security measures often fall short of measuring the dynamic modern-day threats. This is where red teaming comes in, a powerful approach that simulates real-world attacks to identify and address security gaps before they can be exploited. Standard red teaming tools are crucial in mimicking real attackers’ actions and uncovering vulnerabilities.
What is Red Teaming?
Red teaming is a controlled cyberattack simulation where a team of ethical hackers, known as the red team, acts as adversaries.
An in-house red team is a permanent group within an organisation responsible for improving the security culture, emulating real-world adversaries, and continuously assessing the security posture through manual exercises or continuous, automated testing. They aim to breach an organisation’s defences, mimicking real-world cyber criminals’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This exercise provides invaluable insights into an organisation’s security posture and helps prioritise areas for improvement.
Benefits of a Red Team Exercise
Red Teaming benefits support businesses with long-term improvements on both strategic and tactical fronts. It provides direct input to the security strategy by validating the people, processes and technological controls.
Here are some key advantages:
Strengthened Security Posture
By proactively identifying weaknesses, red teaming allows organisations to implement robust countermeasures, reducing the risk of successful attacks.
Enhanced Incident Response
Red team exercises provide hands-on training for the organisation’s blue team (defenders), sharpening their skills in detecting, responding to, and mitigating real-world threats.
Heightened Security Awareness
Red teaming educates employees about the evolving threat landscape, making them more vigilant against phishing, social engineering, and other attack vectors.
Proactive Risk Management
By exposing vulnerabilities before they’re exploited, red teaming enables organisations to take a proactive approach to risk management, minimising potential damage and financial losses.
Validated Security Investments
Red teaming verifies the effectiveness of security tools and technologies, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively.
How is Red Teaming Performed?
Red teaming is a multi-phased process, typically involving the following stages:
- Planning and Scoping This initial phase involves defining the scope of the red team exercise, including the target systems, data, and resources. The red and blue teams work together to establish clear rules of engagement to ensure the exercise is conducted safely and ethically.
- Surveillance and Intelligence Gathering The red team gathers information about the organisation’s network, security posture, and potential vulnerabilities. This may involve social engineering tactics, open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, and scanning for exposed systems.
- Gaining Initial Access The red team attempts to gain a foothold in the organisation’s network using various techniques, including exploiting known vulnerabilities, social engineering attacks, and physical security breaches.
- Lateral Movement and Escalation of Privileges Once initial access is established, the red team attempts to move laterally across the network, compromising additional systems and escalating their privileges to access more sensitive data and resources.
- Maintaining Persistence The red team may attempt to establish persistence mechanisms within the network to support access and facilitate future attacks.
- Covering Tracks To avoid detection, a red team may attempt to cover their tracks by deleting logs and obfuscating their activities.
- Reporting and Remediation Following the exercise, the red team assessment provides a detailed report outlining their findings, including the vulnerabilities exploited, the attack’s impact, and remediation recommendations. The blue team then uses this information to prioritise vulnerabilities and implement corrective measures.
Red Teaming Vs. Penetration Testing
While red teaming and penetration testing aim to uncover vulnerabilities, they differ in crucial aspects, as discussed in this section. Red team testing goes beyond a traditional penetration test by including physical penetration, social engineering, and an element of surprise, with no warning to the defending team.
In short, you can remember this about pen testing vs red team:
Pen testing is like an inch-wide mile-deep investigation for security issues, and red team exercise is a mile-wide inch-deep exercise to find security issues.
Scope
Penetration testing typically focuses on a specific scope, such as a list of systems, a network, a web application, or an API. At the same time, red teaming is conducted against the entire organisation to measure its effectiveness against an attack.
Objectives
Penetration testing focuses on the in-depth assessment of the pre-defined scope. In contrast, red teaming focuses on achieving specific goals, such as exfiltrating sensitive data or disrupting critical operations, simulating the actions of real-world attackers through any means discovered as a way to get into the organisation environment.
Duration
Penetration tests are usually time-bound (e.g., a few days or weeks), whereas red teaming exercises can extend for weeks or months, mirroring the persistence of advanced persistent threats (APTs).
Tools and Techniques
Penetration testers often rely on commercial tools and known vulnerabilities. Red team operations employ a comprehensive range of techniques to emulate sophisticated adversaries, including custom-developed tools, social engineering, and physical intrusion, to simulate real-world adversaries’ tactics, methods, and procedures against an organisation’s systems.
Awareness
Organisations are generally aware of penetration testing activities and collaborate with the testers. In contrast, red teaming exercises are conducted covertly, with the blue team unaware of the attack, creating a more realistic scenario to test incident response capabilities.
💡Read in depth: Red Teaming Vs. Penetration Testing
Red Team Vs Blue Teams Vs Purple Team
Here is a rundown of the three teams’ main differences and roles.
- Red Teams: Ethical hackers who act as adversaries, proactively seeking vulnerabilities and testing the organisation’s defences in real-time to find their way in. A red team member coordinates and executes specific tasks during a simulated security assessment, such as navigating the building, dividing the room into sections, avoiding disturbances, and communicating with the team leader in various situations.
- Blue Teams: The organisation’s defenders who monitor, detect, and respond to threats, working to maintain and improve the security posture.
- Purple Teams: A collaborative model where red and blue teams work together, sharing knowledge, expertise, and insights to strengthen the organisation’s security posture continuously.
Summary:
Red teams simulate attacks to identify vulnerabilities, while blue teams focus on defense and incident response. Purple teams combine the red and blue team approaches, ensuring the offensive and defensive teams think alike to improve the overall capability of an organisation. The purple team approach helps optimize security by ensuring that the offensive and defensive teams work together to continuously improve the organization’s security posture.
💡Suggested read: Purple teaming
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Types of Red Teaming
Red teams can approach their mission from various angles, each offering valuable insights:
External Red Teaming
Simulates attacks outside the organisation’s network to test perimeter defences and incident response, identifying weaknesses that real attackers could exploit.
Internal Red Teaming
Assesses security from within the network, focusing on lateral movement and privilege escalation, revealing how far attackers could get once inside.
Physical Red Teaming
Evaluates physical security controls, such as access to buildings, data centres, or sensitive areas, ensuring that physical barriers are robust.
Social Engineering
Exploits human vulnerabilities through phishing, vishing, or impersonation to gain access or information, highlighting potential employee susceptibility to manipulation.
Application Red Teaming
Targets specific applications or software to identify vulnerabilities and potential exploits, revealing flaws that could be used to compromise systems.
Cloud Red Teaming
Focuses on cloud infrastructure and services to assess misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and potential attack paths, protecting critical data and services hosted in the cloud.
Red team testing is crucial for helping the security team improve its security posture by identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before real attackers can exploit them.
Red Teaming Examples
To understand the different types of red teaming, we have included easy examples to relate to and understand the attack vectors linked to each exercise.
- Targeted Spear Phishing: Crafting personalised emails to trick specific employees into clicking malicious links or revealing confidential information.
- Physical Intrusion: Attempting access to secure facilities by tailgating employees or exploiting weaknesses in physical security measures.
- Watering Hole Attacks: Setting up malware infections through compromised websites frequently visited by the target organisation staff.
- Supply Chain Compromise: Exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party vendors or suppliers to infiltrate the target organisation’s network.
Red Teaming Techniques and Phases
Red teaming is not a haphazard endeavour; it is a meticulously planned and executed operation designed to replicate the tactics and techniques of real-world adversaries. The mere planning, OSINT and attack setup can take a few weeks. This partly also answers why it’s expensive compared to other security assessments. Security teams face significant challenges in conducting red team exercises, but continuous, automated testing can benefit them by providing ongoing assessments of their security posture.
The methodology below includes phases with an overview of activities further customised with toolsets and techniques based on the target to achieve an attack layout.
1. Reconnaissance and Intelligence Gathering: The initial phase of a red team engagement involves an in-depth survey of the target organisation. This includes gathering extensive open-source intelligence (OSINT) from publicly available sources, social media profiling of employees, and potentially technical reconnaissance such as port scanning and vulnerability assessments. Social engineering techniques may elicit information from unsuspecting employees, potentially through phishing emails or targeted spear-phishing campaigns.
2. Threat Modeling and Attack Planning: Armed with the gathered intelligence, the red team develops a comprehensive threat model, identifying potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities. Meticulous planning follows, outlining the specific attack scenarios, tools, and techniques. This phase often involves extensive collaboration among red team members, leveraging their diverse expertise to craft a multi-faceted attack strategy.
3. Attack Execution and Exploitation: The red team deploys the planned attacks, utilising various techniques to penetrate the target’s defences. This may involve exploiting known vulnerabilities, social engineering tactics, or advanced techniques such as domain fronting to bypass security controls. The goal is not simply to gain access but to simulate the actions of a determined adversary, moving laterally through the network, escalating privileges, and exfiltrating sensitive data.
4. Command and Control (C2) Infrastructure: To maintain covert communication and control over compromised systems, red teams often establish a dedicated C2 infrastructure. This infrastructure may utilise encryption, obfuscation techniques, and domain fronting to evade detection by security tools and monitoring systems.
5. Evasion and Persistence: Red teams utilise various techniques to evade detection and establish persistence within the target environment effectively. These tactics may involve turning off security tools or creating backdoors. The primary objective is to simulate the sustained existence of an advanced persistent threat (APT), thereby assessing the blue team’s proficiency in detecting and promptly responding to subtle anomalies
6. Reporting and Debriefing: Upon completion of the engagement, the red team compiles a detailed report outlining the vulnerabilities discovered, attack paths taken, and the impact of the simulated attacks. A comprehensive debriefing session with the blue squad gives them actionable insights to enhance their defences and incident response capabilities.
Red teaming tools we use
Each team relies on several areas where red teaming tools such as Cobalt Strike and standard penetration testing tools that are commercially licensed and open-sourced are used during the engagements. Several C2 instances or utilities are proprietary to the organisation to avoid detections during the red teaming operations explicitly written for their internal teams.
How much do red teaming services cost?
Red teaming services can vary significantly in cost, depending on several factors:
- Scope and Complexity: The size and complexity of the engagement directly impact the cost. Targeting multiple systems and networks over an extended period naturally costs more than a narrow, short-term exercise.
- Team Expertise: Highly skilled and experienced red teams command a premium. The expertise required depends on the organisation’s security posture and the desired depth of testing.
- Methodology: The chosen method influences the cost. This differs from penetration testing methodology because red teaming methodology includes confirmations for social engineering, physical security, and other elements that should be agreed upon during the contract and scope negotiations.
While a precise cost estimate is difficult without specific details, red teaming engagements typically range from £15,000 to £50,000 for medium to large engagements.
🧠Author’s take: From our experience working with well-known financial institutions and large organisations, we have learnt that red teaming investments are justified after an organisation has achieved a certain level of cyber security maturity. This is simply because checking on real-time attack responses includes multiple internal departments working in tandem like a well-oiled machine.
Without the initial people, process and technological controls synchronisation, it is worth investing the same budget on security maturity before validating this with red teaming. In other examples, we have observed red teaming being utilised to establish business cases and raise awareness amongst boards.
How Cyphere can help with Red Teaming?
Cyphere is a trusted partner in strengthening your organisation’s cyber resilience. Our experienced red team professionals will conduct comprehensive assessments, identifying vulnerabilities and providing actionable recommendations for improvement.
We offer tailored red teaming services, simulating realistic attack scenarios to test your defences and enhance incident response capabilities. With Cyphere, you’ll gain the confidence that comes with knowing your organisation is prepared to face evolving cyber threats.
Cyphere’s red teaming experts provide comprehensive services tailored to your unique needs. We’ll:
- Conduct a thorough assessment of your security posture, identifying vulnerabilities and weaknesses across your people, processes, and technology controls.
- Develop a customised red team exercise that simulates real-world attack scenarios, exposing your organisation to the threats it faces where it hurts the most.
- Provide detailed reports with actionable findings, metrics, and recommendations to improve the customer organisation’s security posture. It includes insights into an organisation’s security capabilities, observations and conclusions on detective and protective controls and provides comprehensive documentation of vulnerabilities and weaknesses identified during the exercise.
- Train your blue team to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyberattacks effectively and through a range of follow-up exercises such as SOC readiness, tabletop exercises, and a knowledge-sharing session solely focussed on the last concluded red team.
Contact our team at Cyphere today to discuss whether this is the right fit and, if so, how our red teaming services can help raise your security game.
