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Red teaming

Red Team Exercise is destined to reveal the readiness of an organization to withstand the real cyber threats and provides an overview of gaps in enterprise defense capabilities.

Conducting a periodic Red Team Exercise allows to gather valuable insight about technology, people, and process weaknesses inside an organization, which serves as a foundation for an effective cyber security strategy and roadmap.

what is red teaming? what needs to be agreed before red teaming? what happens after testing? what are the benefits of red team exercises?

What is Red teaming?

  • Red Team Exercise is destined to reveal the readiness of an organization to withstand the real cyber threats and provides an overview of gaps in enterprise defense capabilities.
  • Conducting a periodic Red Team Exercise allows to gather valuable insight about technology, people, and process weaknesses inside an organization, which serves as a foundation for an effective cyber security strategy and roadmap.

What needs to be agreed before red teaming?

In the first stage, the testing scope is agreed, ie what is tested in more detail and what is excluded from the test. The initial planned workload is also agreed upon, and depending on the nature of the test, the goals of the red teaming exercise towards which the testers will work. An overall approach and a team of project participants who are aware of the test are agreed. Each test is unique in nature because each application and organization is different.

 

The three most common approach of testing are:

  • Black-box approach – black box engagement is better at emulating a real-life attacker, since the penetration testers do not have access to any information about the client’s systems beforehand. However, this runs the risk of testers overlooking critical weaknesses.
  • Grey-box approach– in a grey-box engagement, penetration tester are given some information about a client’s environment, such as low level credentials. This allows penetration testers to better simulate an attacker that has already gained access to a client’s internal network. It also means testers do not have to spend as much time on reconnaissance.
  • White-box approach – this kind of test allows for a much more thorough and comprehensive assessment of an organization’s weaknesses, but it is not very realistic.

Agreement conditions are defined in the Statement of Work, which consists of the following details:

    • Goal and scope description
    • Testing level
    • Timeline of the engagement
    • Agreed rules

What happens during the red teaming?

  • CYBERS leverages tools, tactics, techniques, and procedures, commonly used by cybercriminals to gather unauthorized access to company assets and data.
  • As a result of such exercise, CYBERS experts will acquire rights and permissions to company assets and collect information agreed upon the engagement.
  • To achieve this mission, CYBERS will use the same tools, techniques, and processes what are commonly used by cybercriminals or hackers, but with only one huge difference – CYBERS red team is looking for weak spots in systems, processes, and people to achieve the agreed target, and acts ethically by showing weaknesses to customers.

What happens after testing?

The purpose of the post-engagement stage is to provide the Customer with a through report of findings revealed durning the previous stage, illustrating the outcome of the exercise and carried out activities. Report will contain finding remediations. On Customer’s request, CYBERS will conduct a briefing of findings to the Customer’s personnel, such as executives, management, technical staff and other required stakeholders.

Report will be in English, unless stated otherwise in Statement of Work.

Final report will be provided within 1 week(s) after the work is completed.

What are the benefits of Red Team Exercises?

  • Prepare for real cyber security incidents by mimicking the attacker’s behavior in your environment.
  • Test Your security team, defense tools, processes and techniques, systems’ detection and response capabilities to identify gaps in defense.
  • Perform a realistic assessment of the effectiveness and resiliency of your environment’s security tools.
  • Get a thorough report on the vulnerabilities exposed and guidance to remediate the findings. Gather insight about posture, strengths, and weaknesses observed during the briefing of lessons learnt.
  • Identify systems that might need a thoroughgoing penetration testing to find all the vulnerabilities.
  • Raise the security awareness of the executives of company and justify increasing investments in security.

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CYBERS provides a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity services, which can be mixed and matched according to your organization’s needs.