Skip to main content

Red teaming


Red teaming is the practice of rigorously challenging plans, policies, systems and assumptions by adopting an adversarial approach. The purpose of red teaming is to countermand cognitive errors that impair critical thinking such as group think and confirmation bias. In the enterprise, a red team may be either a contracted external third party or an internal group whose existence has not been shared with employees.

Red teaming as a formal discipline originated with the military and intelligence agencies. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) handbook defines red teaming as the art of applying critical thinking from a variety of perspectives to challenge assumptions and explore alternative outcomes. Its earliest implementation in the enterprise was in security, where ethical hacking and pen testing are two common examples of using contrarian thinking as part of an organization’s strategic planning process.

A properly conducted red team exercise extends further than simply identifying gaps in security practices and controls. Instead, it determines how an organization is equipped to deal with real-world attacks. For example, results can be used to engage a board of directors to get further investment in security defenses and staff security awareness training.

Red team testing vs. pen testing

Red team exercises generally start with passive reconnaissance and open source intelligence gathering, using publicly available data such as social media postings and online searches to identify individuals to target within the organization.

While a penetration test usually relies upon the company providing relevant information such as the IP addresses to scan or the necessary credentials to access an application, a red team starts from the same position as a real attacker from inside or out of the organization. Red team exercises also take place without the knowledge of most personnel at the target organization.

The legal implications of a red team are much the same as for a penetration test. This means the attack team could potentially be in contravention of the Computer Misuse Act, and the Data Protection Act (DPA) could come into play where access to data is concerned. Provision of the relevant authorization avoids the former, and if the security company conforms to standards such as ISO27001 and ISO9001, DPA issues can be avoided.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ghosting

Ghosting is to cease communications without notification. The use of the word "ghost" as a verb originated in social media in reference to dating, but the term is now used by employers to describe employees and potential employees who suddenly disappear. Typically, ghosting is used to describe: Job candidates who suddenly stop responding to messages. New hires who fail to show up for their first day of work. Employees who do not show up for a shift. Employees who leave work in the middle of the day and never come back. Some analysts blame ghosting on millennial entitlement. The reasoning is that members of the millennial generation have been brought up to feel they are special -- so special, in fact, that they do not need to follow conventional rules of behavior. Other analysts, however, maintain that ghosting behavior stems from changes in the job market and the phenomenon is simply a reflection of the laws of supply and demand in a healthy jo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data deduplication

Data deduplication -- often called intelligent compression or single-instance storage -- is a process that eliminates redundant copies of data and reduces storage overhead. Data deduplication techniques ensure that only one unique instance of data is retained on storage media, such as disk, flash or tape. Redundant data blocks are replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy. In that way, data deduplication closely aligns with incremental backup, which copies only the data that has changed since the previous backup. For example, a typical email system might contain 100 instances of the same 1 megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB of storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is stored; each subsequent instance is referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand drops to 1 MB. Target vs. source deduplication Data deduplica...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more