Red Team vs Blue Team: differences between two strategies to protect your business

Since the great classical epics, humankind has been obsessed with epic conflicts: Greeks vs. Trojans, David vs. Goliath, Karpov vs. Kasparov… and Kasparov himself representing the human being against Deep Blue, the AI developed by IBM at the end of the 1990s…

In the field of cybersecurity, the most iconic duel is the Red Team vs Blue Team. However, this is a very different confrontation from the previous ones. Why? Both contenders seek the same thing, even if they play antagonistic roles: to improve a company’s defensive capabilities.

In this article, we will unravel the keys to the Red Team vs. Blue Team confrontation and highlight the importance of conducting Red Team exercises in technologically mature companies.

What is the Blue Team’s mission?

It is popularly believed that the Blue Team is responsible for detecting and responding to cyber-attacks. However, it is a much broader concept, since it encapsulates all the defensive activities carried out by a company to comply with its security policy and protect itself against attacks.

Thus, the Blue Team must pay attention to all issues related to a company’s defensive layers:

• Security governance and coordination of all the teams and professionals that comprise the defensive layers.
• Risk prevention from secure software design to system bastioning.
• Search, evaluation and mitigation of vulnerabilities.
• Incident detection and response.
• Analysis of security incidents.
• Training and awareness of the entire staff.

To achieve this, the Blue Team must:

• Be made up of professionals with experience in multiple cybersecurity activities, from conducting audits to Threat Hunting.
• Tackle the protection of a company from within and from the company’s point of view. Meanwhile, the Red Team performs its functions from the point of view of hostile actors.
• Work continuously, from the design of security policies to the analysis of incidents suffered by a company.
• Understand how the company’s business model works to protect its critical assets and processes and match security needs with business objectives.

Faced with a threat landscape as dangerous and complex as the current one, the Blue Team has become a critical asset for companies, since it is their main protector against attacks that can cause serious economic, reputational and legal damage.

On the other hand, the Red Team exercises

Red Team’s services consist of the design of realistic attack scenarios and the execution of exercises in which attacks are simulated to test companies in the broadest possible sense:

• The technology they employ.
• The professionals they employ.
• The procedures they perform.

Red Team exercises typically follow this pattern:

1. The objectives are agreed upon with the company that hires the exercise.
2. The Red Team professionals must be discreet and go unnoticed. In such a way, the Blue Team should not know that the company is undergoing a Red Team exercise, but should think that a real attack is taking place.
3. The phases of the Red Team methodology are analogous to those of the Cyber Kill Chain developed by malicious actors: they start by gathering intelligence on the company, search for and exploit vulnerabilities, perform lateral movements and privilege escalation and seek to persist in the corporate network until they achieve their objectives.
4. Develop all kinds of techniques, tactics and procedures and perform a simulated attack that is representative of a real compromise that could affect the company.
5. At the end of the exercises, the data collected is analyzed, and recommendations are proposed to optimize the companies’ defensive capabilities.

In light of the above, it is clear that the differences between the Red Team and the Blue Team are striking, and this is precisely where the value of the Red Team vs. Blue Team confrontation lies. The work carried out by the Red Team professionals enriches and complements the Blue Team’s ongoing work.

The differences between Red Team and Blue Team are valuable regarding collaboration

The end of a Red Team exercise implies the conclusion of the Red Team vs. Blue Team confrontation.

In fact, it is common (and advisable) for professionals who are part of the Blue Team and the Blue Team to participate in working sessions to identify the differences between the Red Team and the Blue Team:

• Participate in working sessions to identify areas for improvement and study measures to increase resilience to cyber-attacks.
• Conduct joint re-enactments of Red Team activities to ensure that they are fully understood.
• Share experiences and lessons learned to optimize the way they work in the future.

In this way, the Red Team vs. Blue Team gives way to a valuable collaboration between the two teams that improves the companies’ defensive layers and their ability to prevent, detect and respond to real attacks.

4. Five benefits of Red Team vs. Blue Team for enterprises

Why should companies invest in the Red Team vs. Blue Team duel? Why can the differences between the Red and Blue Team enrich a company?

These are the main benefits of conducting a Red Team exercise in a company:

1. Detect security breaches that have gone unnoticed by the Blue Team before real attackers successfully exploit them.
2. Evaluate detection and response capabilities and propose recommendations to optimize them.
3. Increase a company’s resilience to complex and sophisticated attacks and highlight the consequences of their occurrence.
4. Train Blue Team professionals by confronting them with 100% realistic cyber-attack simulations that employ the same tactics, techniques and procedures as the malicious actors.
5. Comply with cybersecurity regulations. In both Europe and the United States, regulations are being passed that impose stricter security and data protection measures on companies, especially those operating in critical sectors. For example, European financial institutions must undergo TLPT tests that include Red Team exercises to increase the cyber resilience of the financial sector as stipulated in the DORA regulation. Similarly, Red Team exercises are also relevant for compliance with the NIS2 directive.

Ultimately, unlike other epic duels, in the case of Red Team vs. Blue Team, victory is not about defeating the opponent but optimizing an organization’s defensive capabilities.

Thus, the differences between Red Team and Blue Team mean that they are not opposing services, but complementary. To the extent that Red Team’s services are essential to train the professionals in charge of a company’s defense and to identify opportunities for improvement in its security strategy.