More and more organisations are hiring a Red Team to simulate a real world cyber attack. A Red Team takes on the role of an attacker and thoroughly tests the organisations defences. A Red Team exercise involves comprehensive testing across the organisation exposing vulnerabilities at all levels more so than a traditional penetration test. This can really help the organisation understand how they would respond to a cyber attack.
A well managed and well conducted Red Team exercise can offer substantial benefits to an organisation. The appropriate Red Team strategy depends on an organisations objectives, risk level, cyber security maturity and budget.
Reasons why a company should consider hiring a Red Team:
Simulate real attacks and mimic a hacker
How will your organisation react when compromised? How does an attacker view your organisation and potential attack surface?
Focus on your critical business assets
Set the targets because of their importance and value to your business. The Red Team will focus on doing everything they can to breach and impact the assets.
Assess your Incident Response capability
A Red Team exercise will test your organisations security controls and wider processes. How will the organisation detect, react and behave? How will different departments behave when put into a real world scenario?
Red Teaming is a cost effective way to assess your wider organisations capabilities
Investment in Red Teaming is an effective way to achieve a level of assurance in your Cyber Security posture.
Bespoke toolsets and depth of expertise
A red team will mimic the threat in a highly sophisticated, targeted manner. It will simulate real world threats against your organisation in the closest way to a real attack as you can get.
Highlight real world attack vectors
You will learn more about the types of attack vectors a hacker will take. This will highlight where your weaknesses are within your people, processes and technology.
Eliminate potential internal bias from the scope
When a traditional penetration test is conducted, you start with a defined scope. This is usually defined by internal teams and there is a risk that this may be influenced by internal bias about what should/should not be included in the scope. Red Teaming removes this as the scope can be much wider and will look at all potential attack vectors rather than focussing on one specific target.