Before starting this blog, you have to know about the Blue team and its operation. After that, you will be able to understand why the mentioned skill set is required for the Blue team. Although we already have a Red Team v/s Blue Team blog, please read that blog before starting here because it will give you all the basic understanding of Blue teams and Red teams.
What is Blue Team?
In simple terms Red Team is Offensive security team ,and the blue team is defensive security team.
Blue team works are similar to the red team in some aspects like network securities identifying possible vulnerabilities in the system.
But what makes Blue Team different from than Red Team. Red Team imitates offensive hackers and attacks in different strategies but the Blue Team has to find a way to defend those attacks and make the defense mechanism stronger.
They monitor all the unusual behavior on their network and block 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
Skills Required to be a Blue Team Expert
Now we have seen what are the operations and control measures taken by the Blue Team. Let’s Discuss the skills required in order to be a blue teaming expert.
1. Detail Specific Mindset
The first thing in a good Blue team has a Details Oriented Mindset. The Detail Specific Mindset helps the to not leave any gaps in the companies security and make it as secure as possible and notice every possible gap in the security system.
2. Complete Knowledge of Technologies and Security Approach
A good Blue Team has complete knowledge of technologies and security approaches the company uses. Also, they have relevant skills to analyze all the knowledge of the company’s security approach across technologies, people, and tools.
3. Technical Hardening Skills
Technical hardening skills are to be fully prepared for any attack or breach and hardening all the systems to reduce the attack surface of the exploit. Hardening contains preventing DNS attacks and reducing their attack surface, etc.
4. Threat Profiling and Analysis
Threat Profiling and analysis is one of the major works of the Blue teaming. When the team assesses the security of the company they create risk or a threat profile. A good threat profile contains data that includes all the potential threats attackers can exploit. One major skill to master threat profiling is OSINT. If you are good with OSINT you can quickly find all the related data which is harmful to the company.
5. Familiarity with SIEM.
If you have researched something about the blue teaming you must have heard the name of SIEM or Security Information and Event Management. If not Security information and event management (SIEM) is a subsection within the field of computer security, where software products and services combine security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM). They provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware.
Basically, SIEM is a software solution that aggregates and analyzes activity from many different resources across your entire IT infrastructure.
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.
The entire cybersecurity industry needs to know more about engaging both of these teams together and learn from each other.
