What is Red teaming?
Red teaming can be defined as the process of testing your cybersecurity effectiveness through the removal of defender bias by applying an adversarial lens to your organization.
Red teaming occurs when ethical hackers are authorized by your organization to emulate real attackers’ tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) against your own systems.
It is a security risk assessment service that your organization can use to proactively identify and remediate IT security gaps and weaknesses.
A red team leverages attack simulation methodology. They simulate the actions of sophisticated attackers (or advanced persistent threats) to determine how well your organization’s people, processes and technologies could resist an attack that aims to achieve a specific objective.
Vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are two other security testing services designed to look into all known vulnerabilities within your network and test for ways to exploit them. In short, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests are useful for identifying technical flaws, while red team exercises provide actionable insights into the state of your overall IT security posture.
The importance of red teaming
By conducting red-teaming exercises, your organization can see how well your defenses would withstand a real-world cyberattack.
As Eric McIntyre, VP of Product and Hacker Operations Center for IBM Security Randori, explains: “When you have a red team activity, you get to see the feedback loop of how far an attacker is going to get in your network before it starts triggering some of your defenses. Or where attackers find holes in your defenses and where you can improve the defenses that you have.”
Benefits of red teaming
An effective way to figure out what is and is not working when it comes to controls, solutions and even personnel is to pit them against a dedicated adversary.
Red teaming offers a powerful way to assess your organization’s overall cybersecurity performance. It gives you and other security leaders a true-to-life assessment of how secure your organization is. Red teaming can help your business do the following:
- Identify and assess vulnerabilities
- Evaluate security investments
- Test threat detection and response capabilities
- Encourage a culture of continuous improvement
- Prepare for unknown security risks
- Stay one step ahead of attackers
Reduce the likelihood and severity of an attacker successfully exploiting vulnerabilities in your network by proactively validating security controls and exposing gaps in security. Our team of penetration testers and red teamers will help you uncover how attackers might gain entry, create remediation plans and improve security operations and incident response capabilities.