Red Teaming
Strengthen Your Defenses with a Real-World Cyber Attack Rehearsal
Red teaming is like staging a realistic rehearsal for a potential cyber attack to check an organization’s security resilience before they become actual problems. The exercise has three key phases: getting inside the system, maintaining their presence undetected, and acting to achieve their goals. The job is to test an organization’s defenses, challenge security assumptions, and explore various attack methods to identify any gaps or vulnerabilities. Overall, the red teaming exercise helps understand the organization’s strengths and weaknesses in a real-world attack scenario.
Methodology
Our red teaming methodology is as follows:
Reconnaissance
Our red team gathers information about the target like email addresses and other important facts. The more information gathered, the better becomes the plan of the attack.
Weaponization
Our experts create a deliverable payload, which means, building an attack weapon. Once delivered, it can exploit the vulnerabilities. This will help understand the organization’s loopholes and weak lines of code.
Delivery
Our next step is delivering it to the right address where the attack is to be launched. Our main goal behind this is to cause damage to the target system using the attack weapon.
Exploitation
A vulnerability in the target system is exploited to run the harmful code. It is similar to finding a secret door that attackers use to sneak into the system
Installation
Our red team installs the deliverable payload after successfully exploiting the target to steal information. This is done to check the various ways an organization can be hacked.
C2 Execution
Our experts take possession of the target system remotely using commands. This helps understand to what extent an organization’s data can be compromised.
Benefits
Cybersecurity is important because it protects organizational assets and services from malicious attacks and safeguards all types of data, including but not limited to sensitive data, protected health information (PHI), and personally identifiable information (PII) from theft and loss.
Our Approach
Our cyber security approach prioritizes a layered, proactive defense strategy encompassing robust network security, vigilant endpoint protection, strict access controls, regular vulnerability assessments, employee security awareness training, and a rapid incident response plan, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and systems against evolving cyber threats by focusing on the “people, process, and technology” pillars.
We, at intelligenceX, initiate our red teaming exercise by gathering comprehensive information about the target. This process helps our testers understand various aspects of the target organization, including its human community, technology, and environment. Furthermore, we also develop and procure specialized and customized solutions needed for the engagement.
For more advanced information gathering, our red teaming experts use the OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) Framework. It is a cybersecurity framework that makes data collection easier. With OSINT, our team can access a diverse range of data, such as:
external/internal network IP range
software technologies
cloud assets
web and mobile applications
previously breached credentials and other information sources
IoT devices, and more.
At this stage, our experts outline the types of ethical hacking methods to be used for execution, focusing on several key areas –
uncovering hidden and inaccessible subdomains
identifying misconfigurations in the client’s cloud infrastructure
spotting weak authentication practices, etc.
We also review known vulnerabilities in network and web applications to determine how to exploit these weaknesses further. Additionally, scripts are prepared for social engineering attacks that involve phone calls.
Our Red Team now puts their ethical hacking plans into action. This is done by targeting servers, apps, and networks. The motive behind it is to break into these systems, bypass physical security, and use social engineering to trick staff through face-to-face interactions, email, phone, fax, or SMS. This stage sets the platform for escalating our attacks and installing further tools. Our Red Team experts’ attack surface includes:
Social engineering
System and network attacks
Wireless attacks
Application attacks
Physical attacks.
At this stage, we document our findings and prepare the report. It is tailored to the specific goals of the exercise and highlights any vulnerabilities found in the exercise. Our report includes a strategy for fixing each issue to reduce risk. The main content of our report is as follows:
An executive summary
An overview of strategic strengths and weaknesses
Identified vulnerabilities with risk ratings
Affected lines of code for each security risk
Proof of concepts for each vulnerability
Detailed steps for remediation.
Next, we perform the physical penetration testing following guidelines from the NIST 800 Series and OSSTMM. We carefully examine the target’s physical locations and internal systems to find possible security weaknesses and gaps in the current security measures.
This process involves two phases:
Active Reconnaissance -This is the phase where we gather information that’s available offline.
Covert Observation -In this phase, our experts visit the target organization’s locations, take photos, and document potential vulnerabilities like unsecured entry points or bypassed barriers.
We then prepare a Red Team Operations Plan (RTOP). It brings together all the intelligence gathered in earlier stages. It includes creating a believable story for social engineering, setting targets and goals, estimating how long tasks will take, and listing essential equipment and insights about the target locations. Once the plan is approved, we prepare the necessary gear and get everything ready, including printing a “get out of jail” letter, to ensure a smooth execution.
FAQ's
How big is a red team and what are the objectives of red teaming?
A red team is built based on the gravity of the simulation exercise. There is no fixed rule about the number of members of a red team, rather depends on the intensity of the work and the size of the organization. The goals of a red team are to simulate real-world attacks, identify vulnerabilities, test defenses, assess incident response, and improve security posture.
When should an organization use a red team?
Red Teaming is highly effective when used alongside vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. Red teaming is useful for testing software after implementing new security measures or for investigating and addressing a new vulnerability after a security incident. Routing red teaming exercise is the best option as it will secure the organization from evolving risks.
Which industries should implement red teaming?
All organizations can benefit from red teaming. It helps enhance an organization’s security defenses. Large enterprises, financial institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies, technology companies, e-commerce and retail, energy and utilities, educational institutions, etc should implement red teaming as a part of their cybersecurity measures.