Red Team — Automation or Simulation?

What is the difference between a penetration test and a red team exercise? The common understanding is that a red team exercise is a pen-test on steroids, but what does that mean?

While both programs are performed by ethical hackers, whether they are in-house residents or contracted externally, the difference runs deeper.

In a nutshell, a pen-test is performed to discover exploitable vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that would potentially serve unethical hackers. They primarily test the effectiveness of security controls and employee security awareness.

The purpose of a red team exercise, in addition to discovering exploitable vulnerabilities, is to exercise the operational effectiveness of the security team, the blue team. A red team exercise challenges the blue team’s capabilities and supporting technology to detect, respond, and recover from a breach. The objective is to improve their incident management and response procedures.

The challenge with pen-testing and red team exercises is that they are relatively high-resource intensive. A pen test can run for 1 to 3 weeks and a red team exercise for 4 to 8 weeks and are typically performed annually, if at all.

Today’s cyber environment is one of rapid and constant change. It is driven by evolving threats and adversarial tactics and techniques, and by the accelerated rate of change in IT and adaptations to the security stack. This has created a need for frequent security testing and demand for automated and continuous security validation or breach and attack simulation (BAS).

These solutions discover and help remediate exploitable vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and they can be performed safely in the production environment. They enable security teams to measure and improve the operational effectiveness of their security controls more frequently than pen-testing. But can they be used in a red team exercise?

There are two approaches that need to be considered. The first, red team automation, has the obvious advantage of increasing the operational efficiency of a red team. It enables them to automate repetitive and investigative actions, identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and it provides them a good picture of what they are up against, fast.

In principle, this is not too far from what BAS provides today by supporting a broad set of attack simulations and providing a rich library of atomic executions codified to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They even provide red teams the capability to craft their own executions. Red team automation can support red team activities, but the value is limited, and most red teams have their own set of homegrown tools developed for the same purpose.

A new approach, red team simulation, takes these capabilities a step further. It enables a red team to create complex attack scenarios that execute across the full kill chain, basically creating custom APT flows. Instead of executing a bank of commands to find a weakness, it performs a multi-path, sequenced flow of executions.

The primary advantage of this approach is that it incorporates logic into the flow. As the simulation progresses, it leverages the findings of previous executions in addition to external data sources and tools. It will even download tools on a target machine, based on the dependencies of an execution.

For example, a sample flow could include Mimikatz providing credential input to a PSexec based technique and drop to disk PSexec on the target machine if it’s missing. A red team simulation can include all the stages of an attack from initial access to impact and even reconnaissance performed in the pre-attack stage.

The benefits of red team simulation extend beyond operational efficiency for both in-house red teams and companies that provide red team services. Scenarios can be replayed to validate lessons learned from previous exercises. Red teams that operate in global companies can cover more geographies.

Even with red team simulation, the human factor remains key in assessing the result of an exercise and providing guidance to improve incident management and response procedures, but it makes red team exercises accessible and achievable to a larger market, where cost is a limiting factor.

For more information, visit www.cymulate.com and register for a Free Trial.