Wondering how your digital defenses measure up against the latest advancements in cyber attacks? BAI Security is here to help. Our Red Team Assessment conducts a comprehensive evaluation of your organization’s effectiveness against the strategies of a skilled human attacker, emulating real-world threats to keep your systems consistently secure.
But what is red teaming? And how does it differ from penetration testing (“pen testing”), one of the key aspects of our assessment process? For all of your questions and more, we’re here to help.
Back to Basics
The most important thing to note about red teaming versus pen testing is that they differ primarily in how you, the organization, responds.
When we conduct a pen test, we take on your vulnerability management program—which is to say, whether certain networks, assets, platforms, hardware, or applications are vulnerable to attack. In this scenario, you are fully aware of the scope of our testing. And because you know exactly where and how we’re hitting, we don’t measure how you detect and respond to our attacks.
Red team engagements resemble pen testing in that they also have specific goals (like gaining access to a sensitive server or critical application), but this is where the resemblance ends. Unlike pen testing, red teaming aims to be unpredictable; it impersonates an advanced threat actor that will use stealth techniques and evade defensive controls to evaluate how you detect and respond to potential cyber attacks.
Color Wars
This threat actor—the “red team”—goes up against your organization’s defenses, a.k.a. the “blue team.” Whereas pen testing is a clearly defined and structured evaluation, red teaming simulates real-life scenarios in order to understand how your organization is equipped to fend off attacks in the everyday.
Red team engagement is typically carried out without any advance warning for the blue team so that ideally, when malicious activity occurs, your blue team will respond as if the “attacks” were real. Pen testing may push against your defensive systems to assess their resilience, but red teaming makes use of the gaps in those systems, dodging security protocols and relying on existing tools to avoid detection.
In short, a good Red Team Assessment is designed to catch you off-guard with evasive, innovative adaptability to push your defensive capabilities to the limit and best equip you for even the most cutting-edge of hackers.
Avoid Status Red
The real world doesn’t give you time to prepare, but with our Red Team Assessment, you’ll be ready to beat cyber attacks to the punch. We offer plenty of opportunities to understand your risk factors and combat them with our proven process:
- Assessment of real-world threat vectors
- Circumvent security systems and controls
- Compromise perimeter/internal systems
- Establish persistent internal connections
- Gain network user account access
- Gain elevated privilege (admin) access
- Identify key systems and databases
- Establish backdoor access to key systems
- Capture sensitive data for validation
To strengthen the weak links in your organization’s defenses, contact us today.