Red Teaming Vs. Blue Teaming

Red Teaming Vs. Blue Teaming

What is a Red Team?

The penetration testing of different systems and their level of security programs are focused by the Red team. A Penetration Tester is a must have for any organizations. The Red team main job is to detect, prevent and eliminate vulnerabilities. To join the Red team, a candidate should be equipped with the knowledge to exploit security vulnerabilities, and needs to know all the tactics, techniques, and procedures an attackers/hackers use.

What are the skills requirements?

1.Think outside the box

To make a better company security, one should be able to think outside the box. Everyone can think but the ability to think outside the box is unique and very important in all fields, especially in the cybersecurity field in order to find new tools and techniques.

2. Social Engineering

Human error is one of the most frequent reasons for data breaches and leaks. The art of manipulating people to get the data of the victim’s successfully and stealing the victim’s data for illegal purposes is called Social Engineering. It could be an email from a pretending friend, calls from pretending companies to pay bills and some pretending to be the account holder person to take over the victim’s account.

3. Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing is also called an ethical hacking, is the best practice of testing computer systems that helps assess security. The pen testing can be broken into five different stages. Planning and reconnaissance, Scanning, Gaining access, Maintaining access, and Analysis and WAF configuration. It is a part of their “standard procedure” and it is also used regularly by white hats.

4. Software Development

Software Development life cycle includes working across functional teams to transform requirements into features, managing development teams and processes, and conducting software testing and maintenance. Writing software comes with a lot of practice and continuous learning, so the skill set obtained with it will help any red team perform the best offense tactics possible.

5. Deep knowledge of system

To work in real life with the system, one should have deep knowledge of the system. The understanding of the system and how it operates is crucial for a red team. In addition, having knowledge of  servers and databases will help to discover and explore their vulnerabilities.

What is a Blue Team?

Once a red team imitates an attacker and attacks with characteristic tactics and techniques, a blue team is there to find ways to defend, change and re-group defense mechanisms in order to make incident response much stronger. The blue team has six steps to perform an incident response which starts from Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery and Lessons Learned.

The blue team is continuously involved to strengthen the entire digital security infrastructure, using software like an IDS (intrusion detection system) that provides them with an ongoing analysis of unusual and suspicious activity. Blue teams use advanced tools to detect an attack, collect forensic data, perform data analysis and help to mitigate threats.

What are the skills requirements?

1.Organized and detail-oriented

Detail-oriented is a very important skill needed in every field to focus on the work and to make sure to fill the gaps in a company’s security infrastructure. Planning and organizing skills shows the clear path and it gives an idea of a person’s update on his work. Hence, it helps to complete his project before the deadline meets and can focus on the priority.

2. Cybersecurity analysis and threat profile

The blue team should know how to make use of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), OSINT’s tools and publicly available data to gather data about your target to create a threat profile. A good threat profile contains all data that can include potential threat attackers and real-life scenarios. With the preparation of such threat profiles, the blue team can analyze the case with the root cause and the possible solutions for any future attacks.

3. Hardening Technique

Hardening is the process of securing a system by reducing its surface of vulnerability, which may apply to patch the system, closing open network ports, and setting up intrusion -detection systems, firewalls, and intrusion-prevention systems. The most overlooked hardening policy is a hardening of the DNS.

4. Knowledge of detection systems

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a tool or software that works with your network to keep it secure and flag when somebody is trying to break into your system. The Detection systems for all network traffic, packet filtering, existing firewalls provide a better grip on all activity in the company’s system.

5. SIEM

Security Information and Event Management is a set of tools that provides event log management, automatic security event notification, real-time visibility, and a correlation of events gathered from different logs or security sources. The SIEM process can be broken down as Data collection, Policies, Data consolidation and correlation, and Notifications. It collects data from external sources to perform analysis of data based on a specified criteria.

The unity of the Red and Blue teams are often called as a Purple team. Both teams work together for the security purposes and learn from each other.