Which of the following best describes the red team role in red team Blue Team exercises?
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There is some confusion about the definitions of Red, Blue, and Purple teams within Information Security. Here are my definitions and concepts associated with them. See my article on the different Security Assessment Types. Definitions
The best Blue Team members are those who can employ Adversarial Empathy, i.e., thinking deeply like the enemy, which usually only comes from attack experience.
See all my Information Security Articles Red Teams are most often confused with Penetration Testers, but while they have tremendous overlap in skills and function, they are not the same. Red Teams have a number of attributes that separate them from other offensive security teams. Most important among those are:
If a security team uses standard pentesting tools, runs their testing for only one to two weeks, and is trying to accomplish a standard set of goals—such as pivoting to the internal network, or stealing data, or getting domain admin—then that’s a Penetration Test and not a Red Team engagement. Red Team engagements use a tailored set of TTPs and goals over a prolonged period of time. Red Teams don’t just test for vulnerabilities, but do so using the TTPs of their likely threat actors, and in campaigns that run continuously for an extended period of time. There is debate on this point within the community. It is of course possible to create a Red Team campaign that uses the best-of-the-best TTPs known to the Red Team, which uses a combination of common pentesting tools, techniques, and goals, and to run that as a campaign (modeling a Pentester adversary), but I think the purest form of a Red Team campaign emulates a specific threat actor’s TTPs—which won’t necessarily be the same as if the Red Team were attacking itself. Blue TeamsThe goal here is not gatekeeping, but rather the encouragement of curiosity and a proactive mentality. Blue Teams are the proactive defenders of a company from a cybersecurity standpoint. There are a number of defense-oriented InfoSec tasks that are not widely considered to be Blue-Team-worthy, e.g., a tier-1 SOC analyst who has no training or interest in offensive techniques, no curiosity regarding the interface they’re looking at, and no creativity in following up on any potential alerts. All Blue Teams are defenders, but not all defenders are part of a Blue Team. What makes a Blue Team vs. just doing defensive things is the mentality. Here’s how I make the distinction: Blue Teams / Blue Teamers have and use:
It’s not about whether someone is a self-taught tier-1 SOC analyst or some hotshot former Red Teamer from Carnegie Mellon. It’s about curiosity and a desire to constantly improve. Purple TeamsPurple is a cooperative mindset between attackers and defenders working on the same side. As such, it should be thought of as a function rather than a dedicated team. The true purpose of a Red Team is to find ways to improve the Blue Team, so Purple Teams should not be needed in organizations where the Red Team / Blue Team interaction is healthy and functioning properly. The best uses of the term that I’ve seen are where any group not familiar with offensive techniques wants to learn about how attackers think. That could be an incident response group, a detection group, a developer group—whatever. If the good guys are trying to learn from whitehat hackers, that can be considered a Purple Team exercise. Broken Purple Team analogiesI have some analogies that I came up with for describing how the concept of a dedicated Purple Team is a bad idea.
> The waiters said it wasn’t their job.
> I know way more about food than these stupid waiters and stupid customers. Do you know how long I’ve been studying to make food like this? Even if I allowed them to eat it they wouldn’t understand it, and they wouldn’t appreciate it. So I keep it here. The UL Newsletter: Finding the Patterns in the Noise… Get a weekly analysis of what's happening in security and tech—and why it matters. Great, so we have waiters to who refuse to take food to tables, and we have chefs who don’t allow their dishes to leave the kitchen. That’s a Red Team that refuses to work with the Blue Team. If you have this problem, the solution is to fix the Red Team / Blue Team interaction dynamic—not to create a separate group that’s tasked with doing their job for them. What are Yellow, Orange, and Green Teams?In addition to the well-known Red, Blue, and Purple team concepts, April Wright brilliantly introduced a few other team types in a Blackhat talk called, Orange is the New Purple. In that talk she introduced the concept of the Yellow team, which are the builders, and then combined them with Blue and Red to produce the other colors. I think this is extremely smart, but disagree somewhat with some of the characterizations of the combinations. I captured my own interpretation of these interactions in what I’m calling the BAD Pyramid above, which is a purely derivative form of April’s work. I also don’t much care for the word “team” being assigned to all these colors, since I think in most cases they’re actually mindsets, or functions, rather than dedicated groups of people. Yellow, for example, already has a name—they’re called Developers. And the Green, Orange, and Purple designations should really be changes to either Developers or Blue Team behaviors. A Summary of Security Function Colors
Common problems with Red and Blue team interactionsRed and Blue teams ideally work in perfect harmony with each other, as two hands that form the ability to clap. Like Yin and Yang or Attack and Defense, Red and Blue teams could not be more opposite in their tactics and behaviors, but these differences are precisely what make them part of a healthy and effective whole. Red Teams attack, and Blue Teams defend, but the primary goal is shared between them: improve the security posture of the organization. Some of the common problems with Red and Blue team cooperation include:
Organizations that suffer from one or more of these ailments are most likely to think they need a Purple Team to solve them. But “Purple” should be thought of as a function, or a concept, rather than as a permanent additional team. And that concept is cooperation and mutual benefit toward a common goal. So perhaps there’s a Purple Team engagement, where a third party analyzes how your Red and Blue teams work with each other and recommends fixes. Or perhaps there’s a Purple Team exercise, where someone monitors both teams in realtime to see how they work. Or maybe there’s a Purple Team meeting, where the two teams bond, share stories, and talk about various attacks and defenses. The unifying theme is getting the Red and Blue team to agree on their shared goal of organizational improvement and not to introduce yet another entity into the mix. Think of Purple Team as a marriage counselor. It’s fine to have someone act in that role in order to fix communication, but under no circumstances should you decide that the new, permanent way for the husband and wife to communicate is through a mediator. Summary
Notes
What is the role of red vs blue team exercise?Both red teams and blue teams work toward improving an organization's security, but they do so differently. A red team plays the role of the attacker by trying to find vulnerabilities and break through cybersecurity defenses. A blue team defends against attacks and responds to incidents when they occur.
What is a red teamRed team-blue team exercises take their name from their military antecedents. The idea is simple: One group of security pros--a red team--attacks something, and an opposing group--the blue team--defends it. Originally, the exercises were used by the military to test force-readiness.
What is the role of red team?As members of GitLab's Threat Management sub department, the Red Team conducts security exercises that emulate real-world threats. We do this to help assess and improve the effectiveness of the people, processes, and technologies used to keep our organization secure.
How does a red team versus blue team exercise help an organization Brainly?This is Expert Verified Answer
The Red team VS Blue team exercise can be explained as a simulated form of exercise or challenge which is intentionally triggered by an organization in a bid to test and access its level of security in other to stay in top of an actual external threat that might be perpetrated.
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