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Red teaming and threat intelligence are essential components of a solid cybersecurity strategy.
Traditional vulnerability assessments often fail at detecting hidden vulnerabilities and give no insight into the effectiveness of your security strategies and decisions.
This screams the need for an advanced, more comprehensive evaluation of systems as well as the people who manage them. This is where red teaming shines.
Red teaming exercises provide valuable insights on threats, which enriches your threat intelligence database. Together, they help detect and mitigate real-world security threats faster.
Let’s understand how red teaming supports threat intelligence.
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Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is actionable, relevant, contextual, and detailed information on potential threats. The information includes organisation-specific vulnerabilities, types of attacks they can convert into, assets under threat, who the threat actor is, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors, indicators of compromise (IoCs), and more.
Gathering, analysing, and using this information helps you fight and eliminate security threats proactively to protect your organisation’s IT infrastructure and assets. Threat intelligence also enables you to make data-driven decisions.
Red teaming is an activity that evaluates an organisation’s cybersecurity resilience by simulating a realistic-looking but non-destructive cyberattack. An internal or external team of security experts (called the red team), creates and conducts this exercise by mimicking the tactics, techniques, and procedures of real attackers. They attack an organisation like a malicious intruder trying to compromise your systems and data and damage your business.
The cybersecurity red teaming process takes an adversarial approach that aims to find security vulnerabilities, threats, and risks in your systems, devices, and networks so you can fix them before attackers can exploit them. It also helps you spot inefficient security policies and plans and overcome errors in decision-making. A fascinating thing about red teaming is it not only tests your systems and procedures but also the individuals managing them.
Using the insights from a red teaming exercise helps you improve your cybersecurity readiness and protect your IT infrastructure and confidential business and customer data from real-world cyberattacks.
Many confuse cybersecurity red teaming with penetration testing since they both test system security, but their methodologies differ.
Penetration testing is a type of security testing to expose vulnerabilities, threats, and risks in a system. These simulated exercises are performed by penetration testers who try to hack an organisation's systems using similar techniques and processes as a real hacker. They are precise and intentional, overviewing how effective your security measures are.
On the other hand red teaming is more focused, scenario-based, and stealthy or undercover. Alongside systems and processes, it tests how effectively your people detect and respond to attacks.
Let’s compare them side-by-side:
| Red Teaming | Penetration Testing |
| Tests an organisation’s readiness against an attack or cyber resilience | Provides a detailed overview of vulnerabilities, threats, and risks in your systems and processes |
| Offensive and stealthy approach to test security | Defensive approach where the plan is known to security teams |
| Longer, could take weeks to understand defence mechanisms and improve security | Limited duration and scope, could take days or a few weeks |
| Evaluates all areas of cybersecurity - systems, processes, decisions, and people | Emphases evaluating technology and systems in place |
| Adopted by organisations whose security posture is more mature | Widely adopted across various sizes or types of organisations |
| Uses various tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that modern attackers use for simulation | Uses automated tools plus manual testing to reveal security flaws, under a clearly defined and structured approach |
Apart from red teams, there are other security teams in cybersecurity like blue teams and purple teams that help strengthen an organisation’s cyber defence. Let’s understand what these are and compare red teams vs blue teams vs purple teams:
| Red Team | Blue Team | Purple Team |
| Simulate cyberattacks to test a company’s security posture | Defends a company’s against cyber attackers, including red teams | Enables smooth coordination and collaboration between a red team and a blue team |
| Takes an offensive approach to security | Takes a defensive approach to security | Takes a collaborative approach to security by uniting the two teams |
| Uses similar tools, techniques, and processes as real attackers for testing security | Works constantly to enhance security by monitoring, detecting, and defending systems and responding to attacks | Ensures sufficient tools and technologies are in place to promote communication and can propose mitigate strategies |
| It can be external or internal | Internal | Internal or external + internal |
If you’re looking for comprehensive red teaming services to improve your cybersecurity efforts, Microminder’s Red Team as a Service (RTaaS) is a great option. Talk to security teams to learn more.
Red teaming and threat intelligence are different processes but they have a common goal - safeguarding your organisation from cyberattacks. So, implementing them together creates a powerful synergy to improve your security strategy. Here’s how you can benefit from their intersection:
Data Enrichment
Conducting red teaming exercises in your organisation will help you gain valuable insights about your cybersecurity. You can perform data gap analysis and detect various threats, vulnerabilities, and risks in your systems and network, weak policies and procedures, and ineffective security tools and decisions. These actionable insights enrich your threat intelligence data.
This helps you understand the risks in your attack surface deeply, create suitable security strategies, and improve the accuracy of your cyber threat detection and mitigation plans.
For example, you identified certain attack behaviours and patterns from a Red Teaming exercise. So, if you add this information to your threat intelligence database, you’re essentially updating it with the latest and relevant data. This helps you effectively combat an emerging attack exhibiting similar patterns and behaviours.
Proactive Threat Detection
Traditional vulnerability detection or penetration testing doesn’t usually perform well in identifying hidden security flaws. However, security measures, such as red teaming, test your overall security posture by simulating various scenarios and advanced attacks. This helps you find threats faster and neutralise them in real time to deter attacks and provide a proactive cyber defence.
For example, simulating a red teaming scenario reveals that your security policies are updated and effective against common threats, but fall short when addressing zero-day attacks. With this accurate and actionable data, you can improve your detection and mitigation processes against zero-day exploits.
Realistic Simulations
Instead of repeating similar scenarios that may not be relevant today, you can conduct realistic-looking scenarios based on the latest threats. For example, if your threat intelligence teams find out that a specific type of cyberattack is frequent, you can conduct a red teaming exercise based on this scenario.
You can also use similar TTPs as real-world attackers to infiltrate systems and test your organisation's defences. The best thing is being more stealthy or secretive, making red teaming highly effective in mimicking similar environments when a real attack occurs. This adds to realism and relevance. The outcomes and insights gained from these exercises help threat intelligence teams refine their incident detection and security risk mitigation plans.
Effective Incident Response
During a red teaming exercise, you can conduct regular simulations on various security scenarios based on real-world threats and attacks, such as phishing attacks, malware, social engineering, permission escalations, and more. These regular exercises enhance your security team’s readiness against real cyberattacks while improving your incident response planning.
For example, red teaming detects inefficiency in your threat intelligence process, such as the use of an outdated tool for gathering raw data or visualising insights. The threat intelligence team can use this information to remove outdated tooling and adopt advanced systems to collect and visualise data.
So, when your organisation is under a real attack, you will have streamlined processes, strategies, and action plans to detect and remove threats faster. This improves your overall cyber defence, protecting your assets and reducing the impact of cyberattacks.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) executed a Red Team exercise, SILENTSHIELD, in 2023 against a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB). It was a long-term, no-notice simulation that mimicked advanced threat actors’ behaviour, tactics, and tradecraft. It measured the dwell time of attackers on a network and provided a realistic view of security posture:
It recommended suitable strategies to refine the organisation’s detection and response capabilities from known and unknown threats:
A red team simulates various scenarios using different threat intelligence techniques and tactics to intrude on your IT infrastructure. Some red teaming tactics include:
To measure how effective your red teaming is, conduct a cost-benefit analysis and find out if it meets your organisation’s objectives or not.
Cost-benefit Analysis
You can create a red team from your internal security team or outsource from a reliable red team service provider. It’s true that conducting a red team will require some investment in tools and technologies or hiring an external team. However, the benefit you get out of it far outweighs the cost. Or is it?
To measure the effectiveness of your internal or external red team, perform a cost-benefit analysis. Determine the overall expenses of conducting a red team exercise, which may depend on the type of scenario. Now, compare how strong your security posture is by KPIs, such as incident detection and response time, resolution time, number of vulnerabilities and threats detected, how many of them were fixed on time, and so on.
Goal Alignment
The red team exercises you perform must complement your cybersecurity goals. Find out whether the scenarios are relevant to your business and industry.
For example, the attacks that a financial institution faces will be different from a healthcare provider. So, if you’re simulating attacks on a financial institution, it could be related to credit card fraud, credential stuffing, phishing, etc. and not misalignment to HIPAA requirements.
In addition, ensure everyone gets to participate in the red teaming exercises to adopt a security-first culture across your organisation.
When you implement red teaming with threat intelligence, you can bridge the gap between data and defence. Red teaming exercises reveal valuable insights that you can use to enrich your threat intelligence database and improve your threat detection and response strategies.
Microminder’s red teaming services are performed by certified security experts with years of experience encountering sophisticated cyberattacks. Some highlights of our services:
Why wait? Bridge the gap between data and defence with Microminder's comprehensive red teaming services.
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What is a read team in cybersecurity?
A red team in cybersecurity is a team of security experts that conduct simulated exercises on an organisation to identify security threats in its IT systems, networks, and processes and improve its security strategy.What is the primary goal of a red team in cybersecurity?
The primary goal of a red team is to frequently conduct simulations to test and enhance a company’s cyber defence.Which is more important, the red team or the blue team, in cybersecurity?
Both red teams and blue teams are important in cybersecurity as they both help enhance an organisation’s cybersecurity. They only differ in their approach - red teams take an offensive approach by attacking a company’s IT infrastructure to test its security. On the other hand, the blue team takes a defensive approach by consistently testing and improving security strategies.