Organizations need to know how well their defenses can withstand a targeted attack. Red team exercises and penetration tests fit the bill, but which is right for your organization?
Information security at even well-defended enterprises is often a complex mesh of controls, policies, people, and point solutions dispersed across critical systems both inside and outside the corporate perimeter. Managing that murky situation can be challenging for security teams, many of whom are understaffed and forced to simply check as many of the boxes as they can on the organization’s framework of choice and hope for the best.
Even in a known hostile climate replete with ransomware, sophisticated bad actors, and costly data breaches, security teams are often pressured to deploy tools, coordinate with disparate IT teams, then left to stand guard: monitoring, analyzing, patching, responding, and recovering.
This largely reactive posture is table stakes for most defenders, but on its own, it leaves one important question hanging. How well will all these defenses work when bad guys come calling? Like an orchestra of talented musicians that have never had a dress rehearsal, or a well-conditioned team of athletes that have never scrimmaged, it’s difficult to know just how well the group will perform under real-world conditions. In information security in particular, organizations are often unsure if their defenses will hold in an increasingly hostile world–a world with endless vulnerabilities, devastating exploits, and evolving attackers with powerful tools and expanding capabilities.
Security’s Testing Imperative
At its heart, effective security infrastructure is a finely engineered system. Optimizing and maintaining that system can benefit greatly from the typical engineer’s inclination to both build and test. From bird feeders to bridges, sewing machines to skyscrapers, no industrial product survives the journey from design to production without being pushed to its limits – and beyond – to see how it will fare in actual use. Tensile strength, compressive parameters, shear forces, thermal capacity, points of failure, every potential weakness is fair game. The concept of stress testing is common in every engineering discipline. Security should be no exception.
Security systems aren’t subjected to blistering heat, abrasive friction, or crushing weight, of course. But the best ones are regularly probed, prodded, and pushed to their technical limits. To accomplish this, organizations turn to one of two core testing methodologies: the traditional penetration test, and the more robust red team exercise. Both penetration testing and red teaming are proven, well-documented approaches for establishing the effectiveness of an organization’s defenses,
Determining which one is best for a particular organization comes down to understanding how penetration tests and red team exercises work and how they differ in practice, core purpose, and scope.
Penetration Testing: Going Beyond Vulnerability Assessment
Penetration Tests (“pentests” for short) are a proactive form of application and infrastructure security evaluation in which an ethical hacker is authorized to scan an organization’s systems to discover weaknesses that could lead to compromise or a data breach. The pentester’s objectives are to identify vulnerabilities in the client environment, exploit them to demonstrate the vulnerability’s impact, and document the findings.
Penetration testing is generally considered the next step up from traditional vulnerability assessments. Vulnerability assessments – usually the product of software-driven, automated scanning and reporting – expose many unaddressed weaknesses by cross-referencing the client’s systems and software with public lists of known vulnerabilities. Penetration testing takes the discipline a step further, adding the expert human element in order to recreate the steps a real cybercriminal might take to compromise systems. Techniques such as vulnerability scanning, brute-force password attacks, web app exploitation, and social engineering can be included in the test’s stated parameters.
Penetration tests are more targeted and deliver a more accurate list of vulnerabilities present than a vulnerability assessment. Because exploitation is often included, the pentest shows client organizations which vulnerabilities pose the biggest risk of damage, helping to prioritize mitigation efforts. Penetration tests are usually contracted with strict guidelines for time and scope — and because internal stakeholders are generally aware the pentest is taking place — provide little value for measuring detection and response and provide no visibility into the security posture of IT assets outside the scope of the examination.
Penetration Testing in Action
Traditional penetration tests are a go-to approach for organizations that want to immediately address exploitable vulnerabilities and upgrade their approach beyond static vulnerability scanning. Pentests provide valuable benefits in use cases such as:
- Unearthing hidden risk: Penetration tests identify critical weaknesses in a single system, app or network that automated scanning tools often miss. As a bonus, pentests weed out the false positives from machine scanning that can waste valuable security team resources.
- Validating security measures: Penetration testing can help validate the effectiveness of security controls, policies, and procedures, ensuring they work as intended.
- Governance and compliance: Penetration testing allows an organization to check and prove that security policies, regulations and other related mandates are being met, including those that explicitly require regular pentests.
- Security training: The reported outcome of a penetration testmakes for a valuable training tool for both security teams and end users, helping them understand how vulnerabilities can impact their organization.
Business continuity planning: Penetration testing also supports the organization’s business continuity plan, identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities that could result in system downtime and data loss.
Red Team Exercises: Laser Focus Attacks, Big-Picture Results
Red Teams take a more holistic — and more aggressive — approach to testing an organization’s overall security under real-world conditions. Groups of expert ethical hackers simulate persistent adversarial attempts to compromise the target’s systems, data, corporate offices, and people.
Red team exercises focus on the same tactics, tools, and procedures (TTPs) used by real-world adversaries. Where penetration tests aim to uncover a comprehensive list of vulnerabilities, red teams emulate attacks that focus more on the damage a real adversary could inflict. Weak spots are leveraged to gain initial access, move laterally, escalate privileges, exfiltrate data, and avoid detection. The goal of the red team is really to compromise an organization’s most critical digital assets, its crown jewels. Because the red team’s activities are stealthy and known only to select client executives (and sometimes dedicated “blue team” defenders from the organization’s own security team), the methodology is able to provide far more comprehensive visibility into the organization’s security readiness and ability to stand up against a real malicious attack. More than simply a roster of vulnerabilities, it’s a detailed report card on defenses, attack detection, and incident response that enterprises can use to make substantive changes to their programs and level-up their security maturity.
Red Team Exercises in Action
Red team exercises take security assessments to the next level, challenging more mature organizations to examine points of entry within their attack surface a malicious actor may exploit as well as their detection response capabilities. Red teaming proves its mettle through:
- Real-world attack preparation: Red team exercises emulate attacks that can help organizations prepare for the real thing, exposing flaws in security infrastructure, policy, process and more.
- Testing incident response: Red team exercises excel at testing a client’s incident response strategies, showing how quickly and effectively the internal team can detect and mitigate the threat.
- Assessing employee awareness: In addition to grading the security team,red teaming is also used to measure the security awareness among employees. Through approaches like spear phishing, business email compromise and on-site impersonation, red teams highlight areas where additional employee training is needed.
- Evaluating physical security: Red teams go beyond basic cyberthreats, assessing the effectiveness of physical security measures — locks, card readers, biometrics, access policies, and employee behaviors — at the client’s various locations.
Decision support for security budgets: Finally, red team exercises provide solid, quantifiable evidence to support hiring, purchasing and other security-related budget initiatives aimed at bolstering a client’s security posture and maturity
Stress Test Shootout: Red Teams and Penetration Tests Compared
When choosing between penetration tests and red team exercises, comparing and contrasting key attributes is helpful in determining which is best for the organization given its current situation and its goals:
| Penetration tests | Red team exercises | |
| Objective | Identify vulnerabilities en masse and strengthen security | Simulate real-world attacks and test incident response |
| Scope | Tightly defined and agreed upon before testing begins | Goal oriented often encompassing the entire organization’s technical, physical, and human assets |
| Duration | Typically shorter, ranging from a few days to a few weeks | Longer, ranging from several weeks to a few months |
| Realism | May not faithfully simulate real-world threats | Designed to closely mimic real-world attack scenarios |
| Targets | Specific systems or applications | Entire organization, including human, physical, and digital layers |
| Notification | Teams are notified and aware the test is taking place | Unannounced to mimic real attacks and to test responses |
| Best for… | Firms just getting started with proactive testing or those that perform limited tests on a regular cycle | Orgs with mature security postures that want to put their defenses the test |
It’s also instructive to see how each testing methodology might work in a realistic scenario.
Scenario 1: Pentesting a healthcare organization
Hospitals typically feature a web of interconnected systems and devices, from patient records and research databases to Internet-capable smart medical equipment. Failure to secure any aspect can result in data compromise and catastrophic system downtime that violates patient privacy and disrupts vital services. A penetration test helps unearth a broad array of security weak spots, enabling the hospital to maintain systems availability, data integrity, patient confidentiality and regulatory compliance under mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
A pentest for a healthcare org might focus on specific areas of the hospital’s network or critical applications used to track and treat patients. If there are concerns around network-connected medical equipment and potential impact to patient care, a hardware pentest can uncover critical vulnerabilities an attacker could exploit to gain access, modify medication dosage, and maintain a network foothold. The results from the pentest helps identify high risk issues and prioritize remediation but does little in the way of determining if an organization is ready and capable of responding to a breach.
Scenario 2: Red teaming a healthcare organization
While the pentest is more targeted and limited in scope, a red team exercise against the same healthcare organization includes not only all of the networks and applications, but also the employees and physical locations. Here, red team exercises focus on bypassing the hospital’s defenses to provide valuable insights into how the organization might fare against sophisticated, real-world attackers. These exercises expose technical weaknesses, risky employee behaviors, and process shortcomings, helping the hospital continually bolster its resilience.
The red team performs reconnaissance initially to profile the employees, offices, and external attack surface looking for potential avenues for exploitation and initial access. An unmonitored side entrance, someone in scrubs tailgating a nurse into a secure area, or a harmless-looking spearphish, a red team will exploit any weakness necessary to reach its goals and act on its objectives. The goal may be to access a specific fake patient record and modify the patient’s contact information or the team is expected to exfiltrate data to test the hospital’s network monitoring capabilities. In the end, the healthcare organization will have a better understanding of its readiness to withstand a sophisticated attack and where to improve its defenses and ability to respond effectively.
Simulated Attacks, Authentic Results
In security, as in any other kind of engineered system, without testing there can be no trust. Testing approaches like penetration tests and red team exercises are paramount for modern, digital-centric organizations operating in a hostile cyber environment.
These simulated attack techniques help to identify and rectify technical as well as procedural vulnerabilities, enhancing the client’s overall cybersecurity posture. Taken together, regular penetration tests and red team exercises should be considered integral components of a robust and mature cybersecurity strategy. Most organizations will start with penetration testing to improve the security of specific applications and areas of their network, then graduate up to red team exercises that measure the effectiveness of its security defenses along with detection and response capabilities.
Organizations that prioritize such testing methods will be better equipped to defend against threats, reduce risks, and maintain the trust of their users and customers in today’s challenging digital threatscape.