Understanding Red Team Exercises: How Advanced Cybersecurity Testing Protects Your Business

Cyber threats continue to escalate in complexity, with businesses now regularly targeted by ransomware attacks, nation-state hackers, and increasingly innovative cybercriminals. The potential risks of these attacks are only becoming more severe.

A successful breach could result in the loss of sensitive data, revenue, reputation damage, and even legal repercussions for your business.

To remain secure across all infrastructure, businesses must regularly assess their systems, networks, data, security policies and processes. The best way to achieve this is to work with a UK based Red Team Exercise provider to run regular red team security testing – or red team assessments.

Red Team Exercises, also known as Red Team Penetration Tests, are a critical piece of a mature cyber security strategy, designed to help you proactively identify vulnerabilities and further strengthen your cybersecurity posture.

In this guide, we’ll be sharing insights into the importance and value of these advanced testing exercises, offering detailed guidance on how you can engage these services to effectively mitigate cyber security threats.

What is a Red Team Exercise?

Red Teaming examines potential vulnerabilities across networks, applications, and physical security. It can also include human factors, including susceptibility to social engineering attacks. With that, red team security testing can also be an effective evaluation of the effectiveness of your internal cyber security awareness training.

Unlike traditional penetration tests, Red Team Exercises simulate real world cyberattacks using methods and techniques employed by actual cyber adversaries. This simulation tests your organisation’s ability to detect, respond, and recover from sophisticated threats effectively.

The red team security assessment aims to achieve specific objectives, such as gaining access to sensitive information within a company’s systems or data held within applications or cloud environments.

The primary goal of red team security testing is to replicate real world hacking techniques and evaluate all security angles to gain a better understanding of the risk of a breach.

Red team penetration tests have some common purposes such as:

Detecting vulnerabilities
Testing software and systems
Identifying potential threats to the business
Looking for errors across people, process, and technology areas
Effectiveness of existing threat detection
Safeguarding against all threats found
Awareness amongst staff and effectiveness of security training
Demonstrating security commitment to stakeholders
Meeting compliance requirements for standards such as HIPAA, DORA, NIS2 and frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2

How does Red Teaming Improve Cyber Security?

Red Team Exercises deliver realistic insights, enabling businesses to understand precisely how well their security measures stand up to targeted attacks and sophisticated cyber threats. This level of proactive assessment is crucial in today’s constantly evolving threat landscape.

For organisations that are confident in their security posture, red team security assessments are the most effective way to put security measures and your organisation’s ability to detect and respond to cyberattacks to the test.

According to an industry survey, organisations that use red team security tests are better able to detect and respond to advanced persistent threats (APTs) and experience 64% fewer security incidents compared to those that do not.

How Often Should Red Team Exercises be Conducted?

Typically, organisations should conduct Red Team exercises annually or whenever significant changes occur in their IT infrastructure or threat environment.

Can Small to Medium Businesses Benefit from Red Team Penetration Testing?

Red Team Testing is designed to test the security measures that an organisation has in place and how they respond to a cyberattack using incident response playbooks. Any organisation that has a mature cyber security posture in place, regardless of the size of the company, would benefit from a Red Team Exercise.

Red Team Penetration Testing vs Traditional Penetration Testing

While both Red Team and traditional Penetration Testing seek to identify vulnerabilities, their methodologies, objectives, and outcomes differ significantly.

Red team penetration testing is a much more thorough and in-depth exercise when compared with penetration testing services.

Red teaming involves much more time than a pen test – maybe 3-4 weeks. This is because red team assessments are far more complex and incorporate multiple areas, plus physical security.

Red team penetration testing takes into account the organisation’s response capabilities and existing security measures, rather than simply looking for vulnerabilities.

Where a penetration test is designed to find all vulnerabilities in relation to the area being tested, red team penetration testing will stop at the first vulnerability that allows them to achieve their access goal.

Depth and Scope: Traditional penetration tests typically focus on specific applications or network segments, aiming to identify all vulnerabilities within these areas. Red Team Penetration Testing explores a broader scope, focusing specifically on exploitable vulnerabilities that real attackers might use to gain access.
Duration and Objectives: A typical penetration test might last a few days and is intended to identify vulnerabilities quickly. Red Team Engagements usually span several weeks, in the same stealthy way a genuine cyberattack would operate, to evaluate your organisation’s response capabilities thoroughly.
Outcomes: Traditional penetration tests result in a comprehensive report of vulnerabilities, listed by severity. Red Team Penetration Testing assesses how effectively organisations detect, respond to, and mitigate real world cyber threats, providing strategic insights to improve security posture.

What’s the difference between a Red Team and a Blue Team?

In cybersecurity, red teams and blue teams play different roles to protect business systems and data. A red team is responsible for simulating cyberattacks, while a blue team is responsible for defending against these attacks.

What is a Red Team?

Red teams act as ethical hackers, at the request of the organisation, to try to penetrate an organisation’s security defences by testing its effectiveness against real world attacks.

A red team identifies vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and any misconfigurations in an organisation’s defences that could be exploited by an actual attacker. The goal of the red team is to provide a realistic view of how an actual attacker might breach an organisation’s defences before a breach can happen.

What is a Blue Team?

A blue team is a group of cybersecurity professionals who are responsible for defending an organisation’s entire infrastructure with advanced cyber threat detection. This is often referred to as a Security Operations Centre (SOC). The blue team ensures that an organisation’s security controls are working effectively on a 24/7 basis.

The responsibilities of a blue team can vary depending on the organisation’s needs. Typically they are responsible for monitoring network traffic, detecting behaviour anomalies and security breaches, and responding to security incidents in real time.

Blue teams use a range of technologies and tools such as intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS & IPS), firewalls, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, and endpoint protection systems (EDR). They also use data analysis and threat intelligence to identify potential threats and respond to them proactively.

How a Red Team Service Works

Red team services might use various methods and phases, depending on the simulated attack’s aims.

Using in-depth evaluation and scoping, Red Teaming will identify gaps and vulnerabilities in an organisation’s defences, including:

Unprotected data and poor access credentials handling
Lack of network segregation
Lack of patching or unsupported software
Limited network monitoring
Phishing attack vulnerability
Vulnerable servers

Benefits of Red Team as a Service (RTaaS)

Red team security testing provides organisations with a clear understanding of how effective their cyber security programmes are in detecting and responding to cyber incidents.

A study by Forrester found that organisations that undertake red team security testing are better able to identify and prioritise security risks, resulting in a 25% reduction in security incidents and a 35% reduction in the cost of security incidents.

However, organisations should look to outsource red team security assessments to a red team as a service provider. This enables independent and objective testing and helps to remediate security weaknesses before they can be exploited by real world attackers.

Red Team as a Service (RTaaS) delivers ongoing, proactive cybersecurity evaluations. The benefits include:

Continuous Security Improvement: Regularly scheduled exercises identify vulnerabilities and issues in addressing breaches as soon as they emerge, allowing organisations to promptly remediate and continuously improve their security posture.
Cost-effectiveness: Proactive threat management reduces the likelihood and cost of breaches, saving resources and reputation in the long run.
Scalability: RTaaS is flexible and scalable, effectively adapting to the needs of your organisation.

RTaaS enables businesses to remain agile and proactive, consistently addressing cybersecurity threats before they become critical incidents.

A red team security assessment will deliver the following outcomes:

Understand how well the organisation withstands typical real-world attacks
Assess resilience against Advanced Persistent (APT) attacks/vulnerabilities
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering to support attack strategies
Provide insight as to how proactive monitoring and blue teams detect and manage an attack
Track responses and apply targeted training where needed
Conduct a deep analysis of your security strategy so you can reduce risk
Design effective defensive policies and procedures
Turn a potentially uncontrolled weakness into a solid defensive layer
See the organisation as attackers would
Demonstrate internally and externally that attack vectors are understood

Step by Step Breakdown of a Red Team Exercise

A comprehensive Red Team Exercise typically involves four critical phases:

Reconnaissance: Gathering open-source intelligence (OSINT) to identify potential vulnerabilities, exposure points, and exploitable information.
Staging and Attack Planning: Strategically identifying viable attack vectors and crafting attack methods based on intelligence gathered during reconnaissance.
Exploitation and Simulation: Ethical hackers employ stealth techniques to simulate real-world cyberattacks, attempting to infiltrate networks, extract data, or disrupt systems without detection. If access is established then the red team security consultants will work to gain persistent access, allowing them to move laterally across the network.
Reporting and Mapping: Results are carefully documented and aligned with recognised frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, offering actionable recommendations and strategic insights to enhance cybersecurity defences.

The objectives of the attack simulation are for the ‘attacker’ to attempt to gain access or attack via methods such as:

Obtain Domain or Global Admin level permissions (access to existing account, or elevate permissions of granted account in grey box phase).
Exfiltrate data, including any login credentials – this could also be though social engineered means.
Gain access to an endpoint or server – in the initial black box test phase.
Move laterally within the network – access to restricted data or server areas in the grey box test phase.
Simulated ransomware attack – possibly as a separate phase, primarily to test incident response times.

How long does a Red Team exercise typically take?

Due to its comprehensive nature, a typical Red Team exercise usually takes around 3-4 weeks, depending on the objectives of the test, and reflecting the stealth and complexity of actual cyber threats. A red team pen test plays out over a longer time so that the red team can remain undetected during the simulated attack.

Real World Example of a Red Team Exercise

Red Teaming Exercise Case Study: Large Gas Industry Organisation

A large UK based gas industry group partnered with DigitalXRAID to assess their physical security risks, particularly concerning tailgating and adherence to their no tailgating policy across their three main sites.

Requirement: The organisation needed to ensure strict compliance with its no tailgating policy, identify potential security risks, and validate its internal escalation processes.

Solution: DigitalXRAID conducted extensive reconnaissance on all three sites to understand security arrangements, staff routines, and potential vulnerabilities. At the second site, DigitalXRAID successfully gained entry via tailgating and moved freely throughout the premises, highlighting policy enforcement gaps. The third site, the most secure, allowed DigitalXRAID entry during lunchtime, enabling the team to reach a high-security government linked area by posing as printer maintenance staff.

Results: The exercise, was discreetly recorded with body cameras, successfully demonstrated adherence levels to internal security policies and highlighted critical areas for improvement. DigitalXRAID provided additional recommendations to mitigate the identified risks, enabling the organisation to implement enhanced security measures and reinforce staff compliance with security protocols.

Read the full case study.

How to Choose the Right Red Team Provider

Selecting an effective UK based Red Team provider involves some key considerations:

Experience: Choose a provider with a strong track record and proven industry experience to perform your red team exercise. A provider with both offensive and defensive cyber security expertise will be able to offer a much more in-depth service.
Certifications: It’s essential that your chosen provider has externally verified credentials such as CREST and CHECK certifications, providing you with the assurance that they offer the highest level of expertise and service.
Regulatory Compliance: Ensure they possess comprehensive knowledge of your applicable regulatory requirements.
Industry Reputation: Consider client testimonials and case studies to evaluate their service levels and reliability.

Conclusion: Get Started With Your Red Team Exercise

In today’s increasingly challenging cybersecurity landscape, proactive and robust defence strategies such as Red Team Exercises are critical.

These advanced cybersecurity assessments provide organisations with the necessary insights to identify vulnerabilities effectively, enabling proactive threat mitigation and improved security posture.

DigitalXRAID’s Red Team Assessment Service

DigitalXRAID’s red team service provides you with some of the highest qualified security professionals in the business. If there’s a vulnerability, our red team pen testers will find it.

With DigitalXRAID’s Red Team as a Service, you can feel safe in the knowledge that your security has been tested from all angles.

We’ll provide you with a full scope, multi-layered attack simulation to gain a complete understanding of how your internal incident response, your workforce, networks, applications and physical security controls respond to an attack and provide a full cyber security risk assessment.

Ready to enhance your cyber security resilience?

Contact DigitalXRAID today to explore tailored Red Team Exercises and protect your organisation from evolving cyber threats.