Red Teaming

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What is Red Teaming?

Red Teaming is an advanced cybersecurity assessment approach that simulates real-world attacks to evaluate an organization’s security posture. Unlike traditional security testing, Red Teaming adopts an adversarial mindset, employing the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by sophisticated threat actors to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps that could be exploited in a genuine attack scenario.

At its core, Red Teaming represents the pinnacle of offensive security assessment. It combines technical expertise, strategic planning, and creative problem-solving to test defenses comprehensively across an organization’s entire attack surface – from digital infrastructure to physical security controls and human elements.

Red Teaming

Key Characteristics of Red Team Engagements

Adversarial Perspective: Red Teams operate from the attacker’s viewpoint, leveraging current threat intelligence to replicate realistic attack scenarios.
Objective-Driven: Rather than focusing solely on finding vulnerabilities, Red Teams pursue specific objectives that would cause significant impact if achieved by malicious actors.
Covert Operations: Red Team engagements are typically conducted with minimal knowledge among the target organization’s security team, preventing defenders from implementing temporary security enhancements.
Multi-Vector Approach: Attacks may leverage technical exploits, social engineering, physical security breaches, or combinations thereof to achieve objectives.

Distinguishing Red Teaming from Other Security Assessments

Red Teaming differs significantly from vulnerability assessments and penetration testing:

Assessment Type	Primary Focus	Scope	Defensive Team Awareness
Vulnerability Assessment	Identify and catalog vulnerabilities	Limited, focused on specific systems	Full awareness
Penetration Testing	Exploit vulnerabilities to demonstrate impact	Broader but still bounded	Often aware
Red Teaming	Achieve specific objectives using any viable means	Comprehensive, organization-wide	Limited or no awareness

Benefits of Red Team Engagements

Provides realistic validation of security controls and detection capabilities
Evaluates the effectiveness of incident response procedures under pressure
Identifies complex attack paths that might be missed by traditional security assessments
Reveals gaps in security awareness and highlights potential process improvements
Delivers actionable intelligence for hardening security posture against sophisticated threats

Effective Implementation

For maximum value, Red Team engagements should:

Establish clear objectives and rules of engagement
Utilize trained professionals with diverse skill sets
Document findings thoroughly with actionable remediation steps
Include proper follow-up assessment to validate improvements
Feed results into continuous security improvement processes

Red Teaming represents the most comprehensive form of security assessment available, providing organizations with invaluable insights into their security resilience against determined adversaries. By systematically challenging defenses through realistic attack scenarios, Red Teams help strengthen organizational security posture in ways that other assessment methodologies cannot match.

As a company focused on simulating realistic attack patterns, VerSprite doesn’t negate the physical possibilities of intrusion. Offering both traditional red teaming exercises and a new variant called Organizational Threat Modeling exercises, we took traditional red teaming and leveraged the PASTA threat modeling framework to deliver attack simulations against organizations who wish to know the resiliency of their company from all angles. Whether you have a targeted need that is best served by a traditional red team, or would like a cyberthreat exercise that simulates the likely threat motives and underlying attack patterns against employees, vendors, physical locations, self-managed logical networks, and Cloud based services. More detail around both services is presented below.

Red Teaming

OSINT? Check. Smishing? You got it. Spoofed domains w/ TLS certs? Like a boss. Human hacking via Impersonation? Hold our beer. If you’re looking to extend beyond robo phishing emails and non-imaginative red team engagements, come talk to us. We custom a menu of red teaming engagements based upon a realistic threat model for your industry, industry sub-segment, and business model. More importantly, we strategically align red teaming goals to both security awareness objectives as well as corporate security governance controls to provide the integrated approach that defines us. Learn how VerSprite’s Red Teaming exercises can align to both corporate governance reinforcement opportunities as well as measuring the real security awareness of company officials.

Organizational Threat Model

Organizational Threat Models – a service that simulates real world attacks based upon evidence supported threat motives – was created after VerSprite received client requests on how the PASTA application threat modeling approach could help simulate multi-faceted, threat based attacks against target organizations.

Each organizational threat model begins with an examination of threat motives. We examine high impact targets for a target organization and correlate to scenarios such as extortion, IP theft, sabotage, data exfiltration, persistence for malware propagation, and much more. A custom threat library per client is mapped to identified business impact scenarios for a target organization.

Once a model has been established, our team launches attack patterns that support threat objectives from modern day syndicates, corporate mercenaries, opportunistic hackers, insiders, and more. Ensuing attack simulations center around one or several threat scenarios, each focused on realizing high impact situations.

As a risk centric approach, organizational threat models can help depict where a security program for an organization is weakest. For this reason, organizational threat models help to define a very effective roadmap for a security program as it illustrates consequences if identified gaps are not remediated. Deliverables and results from these engagements message better to senior management officials since the context of threats, threat viability, and effectiveness of security mitigators are well reflected by the organizational threat model.