The term “Red Team” refers to the group that pretends to be an enemy. In the cyber security context, the red team refers to the group of ethical hackers / penetration testers who attempt a digital or physical intrusion against an organization to challenge and test how an organization would respond to genuine cyber attack.
Red teaming is a full-scope assessment and stimulates the exact actions and follows with the same methodologies of a real hacker or threat actor against an organization and compromises the critical assets of the organization or company. The red teaming testing helps the organization by analyzing the strength of their defense and security controls. The red teaming also determines how well your organization’s people, process and technology resists a cyber attack.
The vulnerability assessments and penetration tests are useful for identifying technical flaws, while red team exercises determine the flaws and the exfiltration of data by mimicking the real-world hacker to test the overall IT security posture and remediate the gaps and weaknesses.
Below is the stages of red teaming exercise from Unified Kill Chain:
Examples of red teaming include:
Penetration testing in which a red teamer finds and exploits vulnerabilities in web applications and networks to access the critical organization’s infrastructure and IT systems using a variety of tools and techniques.
Social engineering techniques and tactics aim to manipulate a person or group of employees. It includes sending fake emails with malicious attachments to trick the employees into sharing, creating or disclosing the network and application credentials or downloading malware.
Physical breach allows the red teamers to monitor the physical security of the organization during reconnaissance phase and then attempt to enter the server rooms or inside the building by using a cloned employee/administrator badge or PIN code access using social engineering without anyone's knowledge.
Intercepting communication or WIFI hacking using different tools and techniques to gain more information about the organization or company infrastructure to find the loopholes and gain administrative access.