RED TEAM AND PURPLE TEAM SERVICES

ADVERSARIAL THINKING

Why Red Teams are Critical to Resilient Cybersecurity Strategies.

ARE YOU READY TO COPE WITH A CYBERATTACK? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

Red Team exercises are crucial for assessing an organization’s readiness to cope with a security issue. The exercises help ascertain whether the staff can prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. They identify scenarios that represent realistic threats to the specific organization.

Red Team exercises, guided by threat modeling and current threat intelligence, give defenders an opportunity to execute their detection and response playbooks. These use the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) as real-world threat actors, but carried out by ethical, cybersecurity experts with the goal to improve security. This results in useful metrics to judge the effectiveness of the organization’s personnel, processes, and technologies.

Why you need a Red Team service in the current threatscape.

Threat intelligence analyzes real-world evidence about actual cyberattacks to help experts identify problems and create representative threat emulation scenarios.

We develop TTPs based on that analysis and our own research and experience. For example, if your organization is concerned about financial crime, IOActive may develop TTPs based on the FIN7 hacker group’s behavior. If your organization is worried about espionage or nation-state threats, the TTPs might employ APT29’s methods.

This isn’t a problem that is going away. New threat actors appear on a distressingly regular basis. Moreover, their aggression continues to grow, as does their employment by governments.

Sources that catalog threat actors and their activities include:

You’d better be ready for them.

And the only way to know whether you’re ready is to test that readiness. Schools and office buildings have regular fire drills to make sure everyone knows what to do in an emergency. Think of Red Team drills as a similar practice, but for cybersecurity.

Why you should consider Red Teams for your business.

Penetration tests and security audits are essential – but alone they don’t go far enough. Red Team exercises assess an organization’s security by identifying gaps in prevention, detection, and response behavior.

Think of these exercises as sparring sessions between the Red (attacking) Team and your organization’s Blue (defending) Team. If an organization does not participate in the contest, conduct realistic tests, and execute its incident response plan, they cannot know whether the plan is effective or where its weaknesses are.

Using Red Teams lets CISOs and CIOs know – with confidence – whether the organization’s existing cybersecurity investment is appropriate and where it requires improvement.

Using an attacker’s behaviors and TTPs in an exercise provides valuable information for tuning security controls. Responding to Red Team scenarios highlights the organization’s readiness to deal with an actual cyberattack. It helps the team improve detection, response, isolation, and recovery, before an actual attack occurs.

IOActive’s full adversary emulation approach enables you to combat the strong motivation and tenacity of attackers seen in the current threatscape, and to ensure your organization is staying ahead.

Overview of IOActive Threat Emulation Services:

Red Team Exercise
Purple Team Exercise
Physical Security & Breach Assessment
Social Engineering

GET THE RED/PURPLE TEAM DATASHEET

RED, BLUE, AND PURPLE TEAMS: WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES?

Today’s cyberattackers and their tactics are as varied as the victims they target. As such, in a digital-first era, we need assurance and validation that our defenses are effective and go beyond vulnerability management and patch cycles.

If we are to protect organizations from today’s threats, we must utilize defensive and offensive cybersecurity concepts and adapt our approach to handle real-world scenarios.

Red and purple team exercises help organizations build truly resilient networks, protect their intellectual property and assets, and ensure they remain compliant with today’s stringent security and data protection laws.

Each team has a crucial role to play. Red teams simulate an attack force, whereas a client’s own security staff – known as a blue team – represent defenders. A red team and a blue team can work together as a purple team to collaboratively improve existing security controls.

To help you decide if our red and purple team solutions are right for you, below, we will explain exactly how these teams can benefit your organization’s security posture.

What is a Red Team?

A red team is an ethical group of cybersecurity experts tasked with simulating real-world cyberattacks and intrusions and consulting organizations on how to improve their defenses.

Red teams adopt an offensive mindset and work to identify vulnerabilities, visibility gaps, and avenues cybercriminals could take to move laterally within a network without detection. Red team activities include realistic threat emulation and seek to exploit technologies, people, and physical controls.

Red teams educate themselves on and weaponize the behavior of real attackers to demonstrate how a real threat actor can infiltrate your network without detection. By understanding cybercriminals’ techniques, tactics, and procedures today, red teams can prepare businesses to handle modern security incidents and events.

Penetration tests and red team activities can, sometimes, be confused with each other. A pentest will typically focus on vulnerabilities in specific software, platforms, and services, whereas a red team assessment can include:

Attack scenarios and campaigns: Red teams will simulate real-world cyberattacks to test an organization’s defenses. Black box approaches go ahead without insider, privileged information, whereas gray box activities have limited information. Alternatively, white box exercises like an Assumed Breach Scenario require clients to provide full system and security control information to the red team.
Defense tests: A red team understands that cybercriminals will use any avenue possible to compromise networks and assets. Red team members will investigate these pathways, too, and will test a company’s physical, technological, and human controls. They will go far beyond vulnerability assessments, and everything can be considered ‘in-scope’ unless otherwise defined in the rules of engagement.
Attack paths: By assessing existing security controls and identifying weaknesses, red teams will demonstrate intruders’ potential attack paths in actual security incidents.
Mapping: As and when potential attack paths are discovered, red teams will emulate how attackers tend to move – quietly and laterally across networks – in an attempt to access additional corporate systems and resources.
Physical intrusions: Red teams may also attempt to access physical locations through means such as social engineering and phishing.
Exploit chains: Red team exercises will combine vulnerabilities and exploits to create attack paths across technical, physical, and human resources. Factors could include everything from weak security in physical locations and cloned key cards to social engineering, phishing, exploiting technical debt, and software vulnerabilities. Red team engagements focus on the full picture rather than separate aspects of a business.
Blue team assessments: During attack simulations, red teams will assess and analyze existing defenses and how in-house defenders respond to cyberattacks.

Red teams provide valuable insight into the mindset of today’s attackers. Red team consultants are critical for organizations to truly understand their security postures and how effective their existing defenses, teams, and security protocols would be when under a genuine, active attack.

Furthermore, red teams can help refine existing safeguards, controls, and incident response plans through measurable objectives and training.

Penetration Testing and Red Team Exercises: Compared

Red teaming and penetration testing are proven, well-documented approaches for establishing the effectiveness of an organization’s defenses in a hostile cyber environment. Determining which one works best for a particular organization comes down to understanding how each method works — and how they differ in practice, core purpose, and scope.

Penetration tests identify vulnerabilities by evaluating specific applications, networks, and systems while red team exercises emulate real threat actors to assess an organization’s overall security and incident response capabilities. Red team exercises are more realistic, longer in duration, and unannounced to mimic real-life attacks. They focus on the entire organization, including human, physical, and digital layers.

Both methods play an important role in enhancing an organization’s cybersecurity posture, with penetration tests being more focused on finding vulnerabilities and red team exercises assessing the entire security program, employee awareness, and incident response planning.

Read our blog to explore these red team and pentest approaches, use cases, and best practices to learn how these adversarial exercises can bolster your organization’s threat defenses and significantly reduce overall risk.

What is a Blue Team?

Blue teams are an organization’s in-house defenses against modern cyber threats. A blue team’s responsibilities vary, but at its heart, team members are responsible for:

Vulnerability management: Defenders often navigate the world of vulnerability discovery and patch releases to apply relevant fixes to an organization’s systems and services. This also includes applying emergency fixes released for zero-day vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability discovery: In some cases, in-house teams will also analyze and probe software and customer-facing systems for exploitable bugs. These responsibilities may also be outsourced via bug bounty programs.
Network monitoring: Blue teams may be responsible for monitoring networks by utilizing tools, including intrusion detection systems (IDS) and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms. Suspicious security alerts are then investigated further.
Incident response: If a data breach or security incident occurs, blue teams may be responsible for mitigating attacks and, in the aftermath, possibly tasked with cyber forensic responsibilities.

Blue team members may include cybersecurity analysts, network or security engineers, system and firewall administrators, incident responders, security operations center (SOC) analysts, and more.

Blue teams are integral to an organization’s defense, and they can collaborate with red teams to improve their own skills, deepen their threat knowledge, and enhance existing defenses.

What is a Purple Team?

Purple teams are formed through a collaborative exercise with the red team working together with your blue team every step of the way to ensure maximum visibility across the enterprise network and endpoints.

Through purple team exercises, the red team creates a detailed attack plan with your blue team taking into consideration the security controls and network choke points where an attacker’s activity can be detected.

During each stage of the attack, the red team executes each action as the blue team monitors its systems for successful detection and complete visibility. The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are documented and mapped to the Mitre ATT&CK framework for accurate tracking and actionable metrics.

THE IOACTIVE DIFFERENCE

To defend against cyberattacks, you must understand their mindset. IOActive Red Team experts will emulate the methods of network compromise an attacker may employ, ethically emulating the real-world, multi-layered attack chains organizations face today.

Red Team Exercise

We help your organization develop a clear understanding of cyber threats from the perspective of attackers – not compliance auditors.

Frequent vulnerability assessments are crucial for improving your organization’s security posture, but to truly mitigate the risk of a successful cyberattack, you need to understand a cybercriminal’s psyche – and the paths they could exploit to compromise your network.

At IOActive, we go beyond standard penetration testing to provide full adversary emulation.

Our red team service and unique ‘attacker mindset’ approach utilizes real-world attack vectors and exploits chained risks that could put an organization at risk. We comprehensively emulate the specific threats targeting your organization and arm you with the knowledge and skills necessary to combat modern-day threats.

Physical Security & Breach Assessment

Physical security is crucial to a corporate cybersecurity program but often overlooked when it comes to penetration testing and auditing security controls. IOActive can begin by performing a physical walkthrough with your security team to identify gaps in camera visibility, potential door bypasses, and physical installation issues that a determined attacker could abuse to access secure office spaces and datacenters. With access to network ports, data closets, and workstations, our experts will perform coordinated attacks to test detection and response mechanisms with your blue team.

Looking for full validation through an unannounced, full scope test? At IOActive, we think like attackers and design our red team exercises with the goal of compromising your most important assets by exploiting your physical security vulnerabilities and employee behaviors to demonstrate the impact on your business operations. Using any means necessary, our Red Team infiltrates your headquarters and branch offices by hacking camera systems, cloning RFID cards, bypassing door locks, tailgating, and social engineering.

It is vital for companies to understand that regulatory compliance and real-world security are not the same thing. Our objective is to help you focus on effective security. That is what our red team and purple team activities achieve.

In cybersecurity, red teams are adversaries, taking on the roles, tactics, and behaviors of cyberattackers today. IOActive’s Red Team, made up of security experts with decades of experience, provides and advises on the creation of continuous, independent, and real-world attacker-emulation services.

The IOActive Red Team adopts the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of an attacker determined to get inside your network. This approach focuses on multi-vector, chained attacks, emulating real threat actors’ methods to penetrate your security defenses. We infiltrate digital assets, corporate offices, and human resources to determine the risks and vulnerabilities in an organization’s IT and human assets.

Our breach analysis expertise grants us detailed insight into how hackers are able to penetrate organizations across a diverse range of sectors. Our threat emulation and red team exercises bring this insight to bear on your behalf. It’s just another way that our unique experience results in exceptional value for you.

Methodologies include stealthy adversarial emulation, physical ploys, and social engineering tactics involving impersonation, phishing, smishing, and pretexting.

Social Engineering

Emulating the same methods used in today’s largest breaches, our red team uses social engineering to exploit your organization’s human element. We employ techniques such as spear phishing, vishing (voice calls), smishing (SMS/texts), onsite impersonation, and social network attacks to gain access to your critical physical and IT assets. The IOActive Red Team goes beyond the usual user security awareness phishing test by analyzing your company and profiling its employees to create realistic social engineering campaigns designed with one goal: access to your company’s crown jewels.

What would happen if the CEO’s administrative assistant were phished or a DevOps engineer tricked into committing a malicious code change? Our team helps answer those questions by developing scenarios specific to your industry and active threat actors. By stealing credentials or getting a foothold on an internal workstation, we show how quickly an attacker might move deeper or laterally to escalate privileges and compromise business-critical systems.

Purple Team Exercise

The responsibilities of IOActive’s Red Team do not stop at showing organizations the potential attack vectors cybercriminals could use to break into their networks.

Our red team will also work collaboratively with an in-house blue team – an organization’s own security operations personnel – to create a purple team.

Combined, these purple team members work together to explore offensive and defensive principles. They exchange knowledge and ideas, with feedback offered on existing defensive controls and the new vulnerabilities and attack vectors uncovered by the red team simulations.

By working together, red and blue team members are able to develop security strategies and plans to prepare the organization to face future adversaries, ensuring improved network resiliency and a maximized return on security investment.

Our red and purple team assessments aim to determine how resilient your security operations are against a determined threat actor and identify gaps in your organization’s preparedness to respond to a targeted attack.

We answer the question: “How well do your company’s security controls and processes withstand a sophisticated attack, recover, and respond to it?”

We design attack paths and campaigns suitable for your company’s environment, operations, and industry. Then, we methodically execute attacks based on the intelligence gathered in the planning phase.

Throughout attack execution during a purple team exercise, IOActive’s Red Team works closely with your blue team to assess attack visibility and validate whether or not existing security controls can detect, flag, or block each attack.

Our purple team exercises include “assumed breach” scenarios based on real-world threats targeting your organization to demonstrate the true impact caused by vulnerability exploits, insider threats, stolen credentials, VPN/RDP access, and physical asset compromise.

Through the collaborative efforts during the exercise to the final lessons learned debrief, your blue team will be armed with the experience and understanding, to resolve the gaps in its security control and create effective incident response plans.

Ultimately, our red and purple teams’ goal is to assess your company’s risks, uncover its vulnerabilities, identify attack paths, and help you ensure visibility and resilience against today’s modern, sophisticated cybercriminals.

While it may be difficult on the surface to ascertain the monetary return on investment for red and purple team exercises, the true return is incalculable when you consider how security weaknesses can be identified and remediated, how you can obtain insight into the most cost-effective ways to improve your security, how you can improve incident response and mitigate the risks of future data breaches, and how performing these exercises can ensure you reach compliance standards with modern privacy and data protection laws.

HOW TO PREPARE FOR A RED TEAM EXERCISE

Red team exercises are invaluable for identifying visibility and response gaps within the enterprise and must be included in a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity and defense.

Penetration testing typically focuses on ‘smash and grab’ techniques to demonstrate existing vulnerabilities in apps, software, online platforms, and networks. Pentesters have no need for stealth and may be ‘noisy’ during tests, as the overall aim is to identify vulnerabilities ripe for exploitation before cyberattackers do.

Pentesting is, by nature, narrow in scope. An organization may request a pentest performed on a single service, network, or software suite – but red team exercises are free of such restrictions.

Comparatively, red team exercises demonstrate the business impact of exploiting real-world vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in an organization by adopting an all-in-scope approach.

These exercises use multi-layered, chained attacks, encompassing weaknesses an adversary could use. Potentially, areas ripe for exploitation include – but are not limited to – employees, infrastructure, physical locations, software, and supply chains. Red teams can then assess blue team responses and how different departments work together as a team to handle a security incident.

The value of red and purple team exercises is incalculable, but foundations must be laid, and questions must be asked, before employing a red team for the best return on your investment.

Preparation: For the best results, organizations should first prepare themselves by establishing formal security procedures. Security programs, staff training, and incident response plans should be formalized, tested, and understood by employees prior to simulated cyberattacks taking place.
Defining objectives: Organizations must ask themselves what they want to achieve from a red team engagement, such as whether they want an overall assessment of their security posture, or want a deeper understanding of specific areas, such as identifying weaknesses in supply chains.
Rules of engagement: It is imperative that the rules of engagement are defined and understood before a red team exercise is launched. While red team exercises are typically all-in-scope, there may have to be limitations for compliance or legal reasons.
Black, gray, or white box?: Black box activities performed by red teams simulate attacks conducted by attackers without privileges, whereas gray box activities involve limited information, such as a set of access credentials. Alternatively, white box exercises require clients to provide full system and network data to the red team.
Going physical: Organizations need to consider whether physical locations, such as offices, depots, or subsidiaries, are in scope. If so, how many, for how long, and where are they based?
Awareness and approval: Red team exercises may be initiated without the knowledge of defenders to measure their responses to what they believe to be a real cybersecurity incident. However, executives, business leaders, and stakeholders should be made aware of the exercise beforehand. If necessary, legal permissions should be obtained.

Once these elements are in place, you’ll be in a much better position to see the true value of your future red team engagement.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

FAQ

What if we don’t need a full red team exercise and just need a targeted exercise?

IOActive can design and execute targeted red team exercises focused on specific areas of your organization’s security posture starting with spear phishing and whaling to collaborative purple team exercises and ‘assumed breach’ scenarios.

Is a tabletop exercise the same thing as a Red team exercise?

A tabletop exercise typically involves a simulated incident response scenario played out verbally or through video conferencing. This helps organizations test their incident response procedures without real assets being compromised, while a red team exercise involves actual attacks on your organization’s systems and networks to test the effectiveness of the incident response process.

What do we get at the end of a Red or Purple team exercise?

At the completion of either exercise, you receive a comprehensive report detailing the chain of vulnerabilities exploited during the exercise, a detailed attack narrative describing the attack process from beginning to end, as well as recommendations for remediating security issues discovered during the engagement.

Are physical security and social engineering always part of a Red Team exercise?

Not all red team exercises involve physical security and social engineering attacks, however, these techniques are often used in combination with exploiting technical vulnerabilities to simulate real-world threats.

How do I know if we are ready for a red team exercise or not?

Read our blog on 5 signs you’re ready for a red team