Know How Red Teaming Helps Boost the Security Posture of Your IT Landscape

Staying on top of cyber threats plays an important role in maintaining the security posture of your organization. To obtain the upper hand and protect your IT landscape from possible cyberattacks, you should adopt a proactive approach. This approach should ideally include detailed assessments of security controls and processes at regular intervals of time.

Though there are several effective methodologies like penetration testing and vulnerability assessments that your cybersecurity experts may use, red teaming enables you to identify hidden weaknesses in your defenses against cyber threats.

If you are looking to improve your response too, read on to know more about how you can do it with red teaming.

What Is Red Teaming?

Before we get into the intricacies, let’s dive into the basics of red teaming.

Consider the situation wherein an attacker can casually walk out of your data center with an unencrypted hard disk. In this scenario, the strongest firewall protection in place may seemingly fail to serve its purpose.

Here, red teaming can help mitigate cyber risks.

Red teaming offers a multi-layered simulation approach that enables you to assess the responsiveness of your people, processes, networks, and security controls against a potential cyberattack.

Furthermore, red teaming can be defined as an intelligence-led cyber assessment that helps gauge your organization’s cyber resilience, cyber threat detection, and incident response capabilities.

So, how is red teaming performed?

The red teaming exercise is performed by ethical hackers using the Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures (TTP) that mirror real-time cyberattacks. This realistic approach helps you understand the effectiveness of the technology, processes, and personnel you are using in your organization. To add on, unlike other cybersecurity assessment procedures, red teaming extends to a longer duration of time.

How Could You Benefit from Red Teaming?

When you begin to adopt red teaming, your organization will be able to:

• Gauge your cybersecurity awareness to respond to attacks
• Assess the capability and effectiveness of technology, people, and processes used in your organization
• Identify and categorize a comprehensive list of cybersecurity risks
• Step up the effectiveness of response procedures toward cyber risks
• Discover specific weaknesses that may have been missed during other forms of testing
• Proactively address risks and mitigate vulnerabilities

It also significantly contributes towards:

• Mapping attack paths and processes that may provide access to your IT systems and facilities
• Obtaining knowledge about the ways hackers can get access to important data
• Identifying processes that can disrupt business continuity
• Throwing light on gaps that may make it easier for hackers to evade
• Better understanding the need and importance of incident response plans

What Can You Expect from the Process of Red Teaming?

An exhaustive red teaming process will help uncover weaknesses in the areas of:

• Securely handling contractors, third-party vendors, and different departments in your organization.
• Maintaining secure applications, networks, storage devices, cloud components and varying aspects of your IT infrastructure.
• Physical security of your data centers, workspaces, warehouses, and other facilities.

What Is the Red Team Methodology?

Red teaming is an intelligence-driven methodology that will enable you to assess your cyber detection and response capabilities. The approach used for this methodology includes, but is not limited to the following:

1. Reconnaissance Phase

This includes the target points that need to be evaluated/assessed by the Red Team. A few examples may include:

• Determining any open ports or network IP address range assigned to your business.
• API endpoints that may be allocated to mobile/wireless devices.
• Accumulating work-related information like the email address of employees, social media profile links, and phone numbers.
• Any possible employee credentials from the past that may have been previously targeted by hackers.

2. Staging/Planning of Cyberattacks

This phase is used to plan out or launch potential cyberattacks by the Red Team. A few factors to be included maybe:

• Determination of ways in which known weaknesses can be further exploited.
• Finding subdomains that may be hidden from public access.
• Locating possible misconfigurations in the IT infrastructure.
• Identifying weak forms of authentication.
• Checking on vulnerabilities that exist in your network/web-based applications.

3. Launching of Cyberattacks

Here, the cyberattacks that have been mapped out are launched toward their targets. This includes:

• Attacking targets with familiar weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
• Launching attacks on web-based applications.
• Accessing and trying to attack targets like workstations, servers, mobiles, and other tools.
• Trying to attack testing environments used to develop critical software applications.

4. Analysis and Reporting

This is the last phase in the red teaming process. It involves summarizing the findings of the complete process including:

• Different types of cyberattacks that were launched along with their impact on your system.
• Unknown weaknesses and vulnerabilities that may have been uncovered.
• The extent of damage these attacks may have done to your system.
• Remediation and mitigative steps need to be taken to fill in the gaps.
• The impact of these cyber risks if left unattended.

Do You Need a Dedicated Red Team?

You could adopt different approaches when incorporating red teaming into your organization’s cyber security planning. You could either have a permanent in-house team or use a third-party facilitator who would conduct the red teaming review for your organization.

About Quantum Strides

Quantum Strides is a connoisseur in a plethora of cybersecurity offerings in the ransomware protection domain, which include but are not limited to vulnerability and penetration testing, awareness training, phishing simulations, and dark web monitoring for corporate stolen credentials.

If you are looking for state-of-the-art vulnerability and penetration testing services, feel free to contact us or email us at cybersecurity@quantumstrides.com