As cyber criminals refine their game, cybersecurity teams have to up their game too. The cost to industry from cybersecurity breaches is in the billions and this doesn’t seem to be dropping anytime soon. Cybercriminals seem to have shifted focus to small to medium businesses with their technology and techniques refining and becoming more convincing and effective all the time.
As such, cometh the hour cometh the team. In this case, Red Team services that simulate all aspects of cyberattacks to find system vulnerabilities and refine threat hunting techniques to keep your business data safe.
With this in mind, let’s look at this in more depth and the benefits of using cybersecurity methods developed by companies such as Tarlogic to keep the nefarious types at bay.
Conventional Penetration Testing
Many cybersecurity teams rely on what is known in the industry as penetration testing. It has its place and can point out ad-hoc network vulnerabilities quite well. It is in effect a cybersecurity snapshot, however, and doesn’t show the big global picture. It provides no contextual information and time and scope limits often provide distorted results. This can bring about further issues.
Red Team Services Testing
Red Team services take a different approach. They initiate a sponsored external attack and unlike penetration testing, the team splits into two and initiates a random attack that can be:
- A sponsored external attack.
- Classic penetration attack.
- Long-term persistence attack.
- Corporate system privileged escalation attack.
- Altercation and theft of business strategic information attack.
The Red Team attacks and the Blue Team defend from the attacks. The use of threat actors, different intrusion vectors, and hacker objectives, helps security teams keep on their toes and provides a real world threat experience, helping teams know what to look for.
Consider the following benefits of Red Team use:
- Detects system weaknesses– Should the Blue Team be unable to defend an attack a weakness is identified and can be shored up right there.
- Improvements in threat monitoring– It isn’t just technology that spots threats but the personnel learning what to look for. This is refined using Red Team scenarios.
- Improving response– Using real world threat scenarios sharpens response from policy to implementation.
- Improvements in the team– The Red Team scenario testing improves personnel skills in all areas of cybersecurity. This can be invaluable in repelling threats. Especially as threats are identified and dealt with at lightning pace.
Red Team Scenario Training
To make Red Team services more effective, a number of threat actors are deployed to give a real world feel to the attack. This includes:
- Remote attacker– This is more than just one guy sitting in his basement with too much time to kill.
- Compromised third party or collaborator– You may think cybersecurity is about code and scamming but it can be far more insidious than that.
- Disgruntled employees– They happen, they are real, and they are dangerous.
- Competitors– Industrial espionage is a very real phenomenon.
- Activist / Terrorist– This can take many forms and companies need to be prepared.
The fact is that Red Team services can save the day as they prepare teams for the day when an attack happens. Make sure your business and organization are prepared.
