Red Teaming Operations
How do your people, processes and technological controls withstand a real-world cyber attack? Our Red Team Operations (RTO) helps organisations test against the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) used by malicious threat actors via a simulated cyber attack.
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What is Red Teaming Assessment?
Red team assessment is an intelligence-led cyber attack simulation exercise conducted to check on the attack preparedness of an organisation.
Of all the cyber security assessments offered by Cyphere, red team security testing is designed to mimic an adversary’s attack to test an organisation’s protections against people, processes and technological controls in real time. This gives an organisation a taste of an attack situation to review their current security defences and understand where they are in their security journey.
The red team engagements differ from penetration testing in depth and scope. Red teaming assessment is aimed at the entire organisation, including people, processes and technology. It involves bypassing the current defensive controls and tests the detection and response capabilities of an organisation against simulated cyber attacks. A standard penetration test is targeted at technical controls mainly with pre-defined scope. Sometimes, it involves the white-listing of certain security defences to carry in-depth assessments to identify security risks.
By thinking like an attacker, or one of your competitors, the red teaming exercise in cyber security is driven to gain access and is not restricted by assumptions or preconceptions.
Why is Red Teaming Testing important?
Conducting a red team operation and working with the blue team leads to increases in cyber defences and capabilities, reducing the overall risk and increasing the alertness levels. This includes checks on incident response, detection and response capabilities around accessing sensitive data.
A Red team operation simulation campaign is attempted to exploit vulnerabilities identified during initial phases based on social engineering attacks or similar vectors and access sensitive information at all levels such as people, process and technology.
- People: Often used as a foot in the door tactic by utilising spear-phishing or social engineering techniques against key stakeholders, senior leadership or staff.
- Process: Exploiting known weaknesses in the processes using information gained during the extensive OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) phase
- Technology: Bypassing technical controls (such as anti-virus) or taking advantage of the lack of technical controls (such as no data exfiltration checks)
Benefits of Red Team Assessments
Experience an organisational attack in a real-time scenario – nothing’s more insightful than to observe your teams, products and processes responding to these events.
Assess the maturity of detection and response capabilities, whether it’s your MSSP or internal security team.
Identify misconfigurations and gaps exploited by attackers in the existing security products and processes.
Utilise red teaming as a chance to build the core security capabilities, increasing the overall cyber security maturity. You’ll be able to prepare a business case that management buys into.
Red team operation aimed at bypassing defensive controls is a great value addon to the blue team with more learning and education during and after the assessment.
Red team operation helps you understand your security performance and shape future investments.
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Key features of our red teaming operation offering
Preparation is key to these engagements. To reflect the objectives of this job, Cyphere Red Team Operations utilise evasion, deception and concealment techniques simulating real-world cyber attacks.
Red team involves no restrictions and includes exploitation of people, processes and technical vulnerabilities. Social engineering, USB drops, physical security restrictions bypass and command and control servers with domain fronting are some of the examples.
Red teaming involves applying offensive expertise at multiple layers. Our red team experts utilise various real-world techniques at various stages in line with the cyber skill chain. It includes homework performed during the OSINT data gathering and analysis phase, technology/software dependent tips and tricks and evasion tactics.
Reports are of no use if you cannot upskill your blue team and not act upon mitigation efforts. All our deliverables include remediation plan help along with strategic and tactical recommendations. A debrief meeting is conducted with management and technical teams to ensure the right messages for the right audience.
Security is an ongoing process. Our red team pricing model ensures that customer pays in line with the achievements and no one-fee projects to deliver value over lump sum charge.
Common Red Team Terms
Tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) is a concept in terrorism and cyber security that discusses a threat actor’s behaviour. By analysing TTP, one can understand the behaviour of attackers and how specific attacks are orchestrated.
An implant will act like a trojan virus, with the main difference that it’s under the full control of an attacker. An implant could be software or hardware deployed to be stealthy and obtain information in a short time.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution is a centrally managed solution, with endpoints deployed across the organisation against effective malware protection.
Command and control servers, also called C2, C&C, are set up by attackers and/or threat actors to maintain communication with compromised assets within the target network.
An artefact observed on a network or a computer system indicating a breach or an intrusion. IoCs provide valuable information on what happened and what can be done to prevent such attacks.
A stealth threat actor ( belonging to a nation-state or organised crime group) that gains unauthorised access to a network and remains undetected for extended periods.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Red team assessments are an effective way of assessing the preparedness of an organisation against real-world cyber attacks.
To measure how well the people, process and technical controls of an organisation withstand an attack from an adversary. It includes attempts at bypassing the security controls, exploiting weaknesses through human elements such as physical controls, phishing and social engineering techniques to bypassing technical controls.
Yes: It is possible where reliable exploits are available before the vendor has released the patch.
No: It is not always Hollywood style hacking because a lot of weaknesses relate to lack of security restrictions in one form or another (patching, permissions, security education, etc).
A few common misconceptions about red teaming are:
- Red team operation is for big companies only.
- It always includes advanced stuff such as zero-days or highly tactical TTP.
- It is just advanced penetration testing.
End to end red team operations varies between 4-8 weeks based on the agreed scope and objectives. There are also shorter projects for 2-3 weeks where tailored scope includes an insider threat scenario or compromise assessment.
The objective of a red team testing activity is to simulate real-world cyber attacks without disruptive actions. All jobs are carried out in line with industry-standard practices by vetted red teamers with strong communication and technical skill-sets and high ethics.
A custom written report is prepared based on the findings. This report serves both technical and non-technical audiences with specific sections dedicated to strategic and tactical recommendations, raw/supplemental data, proof of concepts and risk details such as impact, likelihood and risk scorings. It is followed by mitigation advice along with related references to help customer teams with remediation and improve the security posture of their organisation.
Red Team Security Testing Methodology
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