What is the blue team?
How does a blue team work?
The blue team first collects data, documents exactly what needs to be protected, and conducts a risk assessment. They then make the system harder to access in many ways, including introducing stronger password policies and training employees to ensure they understand and comply with security procedures.
Monitoring tools are often placed in a location that allows information about access to systems to be logged and reviewed for unusual activity. Blue teams perform regular checks on the system, for example, scanning for internal or external network vulnerabilities and sampling network traffic for analysis.
Blue teams must establish security measures around an organization's key assets. They begin their defense plan by identifying critical data and documenting the importance of that data and the business implications of its loss.
Blue teams then perform a risk assessment by identifying the threats against each data and the weaknesses these threats can exploit. By assessing and prioritizing risks, the Blue Team creates an action plan to implement controls that can reduce the impact or likelihood of threats against assets materializing.
Senior management involvement is critical at this stage because only they can decide whether to accept the risk or implement mitigating controls against it. The selection of controls is often based on a cost-benefit analysis to ensure that security controls provide maximum value to the business.
For example, a blue team may determine that the company's network is vulnerable to a DDoS attack. This attack reduces network access to legitimate users by sending incomplete traffic requests to the server. Each of these requests requires resources to perform an action, which is why an attack can severely cripple a network. The team then calculates the loss if the threat occurs. Based on cost-benefit analysis and alignment with business goals, a blue team will consider installing an intrusion detection and prevention system to minimize the risk of DDoS attacks.
Examples of blue team exercises
Blue teams use various methods and tools as countermeasures to protect the network from cyber attacks. Depending on the situation, a blue team may determine that additional firewalls need to be installed to block access to an internal network.
Some actions that a blue team takes are:
Security audits such as DNS audits
DDoS testing
reverse engineering
Memory and Log analysis
Data risk analysis by artificial intelligence
Analysis of occupied digital capacity
What is the red team?
In a Red Team/Blue Team cybersecurity simulation, the Red Team acts as an adversary and attempts to identify and exploit potential weaknesses in the organization's cyber defenses using sophisticated attack techniques. These attack teams are usually comprised of highly experienced security professionals or independent ethical hackers who focus on penetration testing by mimicking real-world attack techniques and methods. A red team usually gains initial access through credential theft or social engineering techniques. Once inside the network, the red team increases their score and moves laterally across the systems, aiming to advance as deep into the network as possible while avoiding data detection.
What are the advantages of red and blue teams?
Implementing a red and blue team strategy allows the organization to benefit from two completely different approaches and skill sets. It also brings a certain amount of competition into the work that encourages high performance in both teams.
How do red and blue teams work together?
Communication between the two teams is the most important factor in the successful training of the red and blue teams. The blue team should stay up-to-date on new technologies to improve security and should share these findings with the red team. Likewise, the red team should always be aware of new threats and intrusion techniques used by hackers and advise the blue team on prevention techniques. Depending on the objective, your test depends on whether the red team informs the blue team of the planned test.
After the test is completed, both teams collect data and report their findings. The red team advises the blue team if they can penetrate the defense and provides advice on how to prevent similar attempts in a real scenario. Likewise, the blue team must notify the red team if their monitoring methods have attempted an attack. Both teams should then work together to plan, develop, and implement stronger security controls as needed.