When discussing cybersecurity, the terms “red team” and “Blue team” and sometimes “Purple Team” are often mentioned. Red and blue teams are more than just Halo references and army techniques.
These Teams Play’s a very vital role in cybersecurity. Originally, Red teams and blue teams are references from the military where red teams think like the enemy and attack and blue team tries to defend against the red team.
Well, the red and blue teams don’t have too much difference in cybersecurity too. In infosec and cybersecurity, one team tries to attack the system and infrastructure of the company and the blue team tries to defend against these types of attacks.
Nowadays many companies and even government use these strategies to ensure their security.
What these Teams do?
Red Team
Read teams are internal or external entities of the company. The team usually consists of offensive security professionals and ethical hackers who are experts in attacking and breaking defenses. They attack the company or organization in the most realistic way, They try to mimic the real-world attack scenarios.
Blue Team
The blue team is the internal entity of the company. The team usually consist of defensive security professionals who have to defend the organization against the real-world attack and red team attack.
Purple Team
These Teams exists to maximize the effectiveness of the blue and the red team. The purple team integrates the defensive tactic for the vulnerability found by the red team into the single narrative.
Now we know what basically are these teams. Let’s explore them one-by-one.
RED TEAM
Red Teams have to find the vulnerabilities in the company or organization and exploit them. These teams use all the tools even hardware to break into the security of the organization. They have to act like black hat hackers and do everything they can to break into the organizations network and system.
Read teams are most often confused with PENETRATION TESTER which is not true. Penetration tester deploys loud (typically detectable) techniques – e.g. vulnerability scanners such as Nessus to find a vulnerability. But Team Experts attacks as quietly as possible without getting detected.
types of attacks carry on by red teams – :
- Social Engineering
- Phishing campaigns
- Insider Threat
- HID attacks.
- Identity Spoof
- Fake WAP
- DNS Poisoning
- Card cloning
- Intercepting Network (MITM)
They literally can do anything to break the company security and get in .
BLUE TEAM
The Blue Team is an organization’s internal security team. They have to protect and patch every attack and exploit on the organization from the red team.
This expected to detect, oppose and weaken the red team. they first collect information of the vulnerabilities and carries out a risk assessment. They also tight up the security by educating staff about these type of attacks and by changing security policies.
They monitor all the unusual behavior on their network and blocks out any suspicious IP. Blue teams have to perform a regular security check and do a regular vulnerability scan.
Some Control Measure Taken by them are:
- Identify the type of attacks
- Identify and block the attacks before they succeed
- Train the physical security teams for identity spoof
- Enhance security standards
- Activate the containment of attacked systems
- Two-factor authentication
- Deny long relay request
- Application whitelisting
- Segmentation
- Manage keys securely
Basically, Blue Team will do anything to protect the organization from cyber attacks.
PURPLE TEAM
The main objective of purple team is to work alongside with both red and blue team, analyzing their work and recommend any necessary changes.
If the blue team and the red team are functioning perfectly then the purple team may become redundant to work. The goal of a purple team is to bring both red and blue teams together while encouraging them to work as a team to share insights and create a strong feedback loop.
Conclusion
Any Cyber Security specialist is aware that security is an ever-changing field, hackers always find their way around the weaknesses exposed in online systems. Even multinational corporations such as Yahoo, Equifax, and, Sony among various others have fallen victim to these malicious users.
The Red Team attack can expose these vulnerabilities before real criminals may find and exploit them. The effectiveness of Blue Team increases through this exercise because the companies can strengthen their security and analyze the unintended consequences that follow any cyber attack.
