when assessing a system’s security processes. Much inspiration for this exercise was drawn from the military-developed “wargames” model, in which two opposing teams are subjected to various simulations and are tasked to either breach or defend a corporation’s security systems.

The red team typically comprises technology professionals with a background in ethical hacking, whereby they will act as imaginary malicious attackers seeking to identify and exploit any flaws within a given security system (via ransomware, for instance). Meanwhile, the blue team is responsible for adhering to company protocols and policies to strengthen as well as patch up any defects in the information technology (IT) infrastructure in order to deter any escalation of attacks across the entire network. In essence, the main objective of the blue team is to protect all electronic assets (for example, proprietary databases, private and confidential information) owned by an organisation, regardless of whether it is hosted internally (i.e., on-premise) or externally (i.e., cloud-hosted).

That being said, blue team exercises are essentially the performance of all security operations centre (SOC) functions across multiple simulated cybersecurity threats to evaluate the blue team’s competence at detecting, preventing, and mitigating any forms of security breaches. Upon completion of the blue team exercise, the red team will reveal their attack strategies and tactics, whilst the blue team will take note of these data points to evaluate their defence mechanisms. Thus, this simulation enables the blue team to pinpoint vulnerable areas within a business network so that they are able to make the necessary improvements to their system. As a result, similar attacks in the future will have a much lower chance of succeeding again.