Red teaming is a cybersecurity assessment where ethical hackers simulate real-life cyberattacks on a business to identify vulnerabilities and provide remediation advice.
Like black box penetration testing, red teams start the exercise without prior knowledge of the system they are attempting to infiltrate to mimic a real-life external attack as much as possible.
Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common, with over 50% of UK businesses reporting being targeted in 2024, according to a GOV.UK survey. This continued rise means that red teaming is as important now as it has ever been for business continuity.
Understanding the Teams
The Red Team
In any red team engagement, the red team are the attackers. They are usually a third-party cybersecurity provider hired by a business and tasked with identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities to assess the business’s readiness for real-world attacks.
They are methodical and will do their utmost to remain undetected throughout the engagement.
The Blue Team
The blue team represents the business’s internal security teams (the security professionals responsible for detecting and responding to attacks).
In a standard red vs. blue team engagement, the blue team will not know about the test, which helps maintain its realism.
Their objective is to detect and correctly respond to the red team’s attack following their company’s incident response protocols.
Why is Red Teaming Important?
There are far too many reasons to name in one article, so we have picked out a few reasons why red teaming is so important.
Identifying Security Gaps
Arguably, the most important aspect of red teaming is that it reveals weaknesses in your business’s infrastructure, policies, and personnel that may go unnoticed during routine audits.
It provides insights into exploitable vulnerabilities, giving you a full understanding of your security personnel’s capabilities and the size of the attack surface available to any attacker.
Using all of this information, you can patch vulnerabilities to ensure future attacks can be prevented.
Testing Incident Response
By simulating attacks, red teaming evaluates how well your business can detect, respond to, and recover from a breach. This helps identify deficiencies in incident response protocols and strengthens defence mechanisms.
Click to learn more about developing an effective incident response plan.
Do you have an incident response plan? If not, check out our article on why incident response plans are important and how to create one.
Understand Real-World Readiness
At a fundamental level, red teaming will show you just how prepared you are to face a genuine cyberattack. More often than not, this is the main reason why large organisation use red team engagements so regularly.
Types of Red Teaming
The best way to split this up is by looking at two different types of red teaming.
Full-Scope Red Teaming
Full-scope exercises cover all aspects of security, including digital, physical, and human elements. This approach offers a comprehensive assessment of your business’s defences.
Fundamentally, this is a no-holds-barred approach to security testing, in which attacks will try to infiltrate your business by any means necessary.
Targeted Red Teaming
Targeted exercises focus on specific systems, applications, or departments, allowing your business to test high-risk areas or newly implemented security measures.
This is especially useful if your business has highly sensitive areas that need to be significantly more secure than the rest, e.g., backup data servers that should not be accessible via your business’s standard network.
Benefits of Red Teaming
Much like the importance of red teaming, the benefits are far too many to name. So, we have picked three of the main benefits. In fact, most of these are a direct result of the very things that make red teaming important.
Improve Business Security
Quite obviously, the most important benefit of red teaming is its ability to improve your business security. By identifying vulnerabilities and providing actionable insights to address them, red teaming ensures that your defences can withstand sophisticated attacks.
Warning: the success of a red team assessment depends entirely on your desire and ability to patch the vulnerabilities identified.
Improve Incident Response
Simulated attacks enable your business to refine its detection and response capabilities. Lessons learned during red teaming exercises enhance blue team readiness for real-world scenarios.
It’s easy for blue teams to panic if this is their first encounter with an attack (remember, they think it’s genuine), so this practice will be invaluable for them in helping them to deal with genuine attacks.
Maintain Industry Compliance
Red teaming is useful for ensuring adherence to regulatory standards regarding the protection of sensitive data. Regular red teaming demonstrates due diligence and proactive risk management, which are often required by PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance frameworks.
Penetration Testing vs. Red Teaming
The differences between penetration testing and red teaming change depending on who you ask. Since neither is a protected term, the lines between what constitutes a red team engagement and a penetration test are blurred.
To us, penetration testing is about providing as much assurance as possible in a limited timeframe. Pentest scoping typically targets individual environments and focuses on finding security issues, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, etc.
Red teaming is typically objective-based, and from a scoping perspective, red teams are granted far more leeway. One key testing element in an assessment like this is to attempt to remain undetected. This means testers must move more slowly and use more targeted attacks.
This means that red team engagements are typically more realistic in terms of understanding what a genuine attack would look like.
So, if you’re looking for reasonably quick reassurance and remediation advice, a penetration test is most likely the best solution for your business. If you’re looking to see how your company would fare in a genuine attack, red teaming is your best option.
To learn more about penetration testing, check out our comprehensive guide.
Conclusion
Red teaming is vital for businesses seeking to strengthen their cybersecurity defences. Simulating real-world attacks uncovers vulnerabilities, enhances incident response, and fosters a culture of proactive security.
While not suitable for every business, red teaming is an invaluable investment for those with mature security frameworks. It offers the insights needed to stay ahead of evolving threats in an increasingly complex digital landscape.