Continuous Automated Red Teaming

A Scalable Method for Red Team Operations

Red Team or Red Teaming Operations is a multi-layered threat simulation designed to test an organisation's security controls against a real-world adversary. During a red team engagement, security professionals utilise adversary techniques to find weaknesses in existing people, processes and technology.

The goal is to evade security controls and breach the organisation on the defined scope and objectives. Meanwhile, unaware that it is an authorised activity, the blue team attempts to identify and block the malicious actions.

The challenges with traditional red teaming are many:

  • It involves a plethora of tools and infrastructure
  • It consists of a lot of manual effort
  • It tests only a fraction of the organisation's assets
  • The result depends on the team performing the audit
  • It is not scalable

Bringing a change in traditions

The need for skilled red teams has exploded in recent years. It has become essential to streamline the process for maximum efficiency. However, there is a need to continuously look for security issues, which is where continuous automated red teaming comes in.

CART bring a better system that allows for continuous and automated discovery of the digital attack surface. It is a system that automatically understands the vulnerabilities, determines the method of exploitation and launches safe attacks which mimic a real-world threat. CART identifies attack paths that conventional tools miss out on.

Unlike traditional pentesting can launch multi-stage attacks without input from a human operator. It works with an outside-in approach and conducts real-life attacks without the need for any hardware or software. CART tools can automatically search indexed dark web data, exposed databases, leaked credentials, etc., to build a model that can compromise the organisation.

It is a game-changing approach that gives continuous visibility and is unmatched in speed with traditional red team engagements. A penetration test is conducted only on a few known applications or systems. In contrast, CART can discover the attack surface on its own, making it super efficient and super fast.

Benefits of Continuous Automated Red Teaming

  • Unlike penetration testing, CART is automated. It's a continuous system that can run faster and more efficiently than a human analyst.
  • Since it's a continuous system, it can automatically test your systems against the latest techniques. So the results of CART are not three months stale.
  • Continuous Red Teaming provides real-time knowledge about your vulnerabilities and attack paths.
  • An updated view on the vulnerabilities allows you to develop a prioritised remediation plan to fix issues ordered by severity.

Conclusion

CART platforms like FourCore ATTACK help the organisation defend their critical assets against advanced adversaries. Solutions like these help find attack surfaces and paths which can cause the most damage to your organisation. CART solutions to perform automated red teaming also enables your organisation to respond effectively during an actual attack scenario.

Open Source Cyber Attack Simulations

firedrill, an open source attack simulation project by FourCore, built on the same fundamentals as our commercial platform: FourCore ATTACK. Perform various attack simulations on your systems now, download the latest release from GitHub. Read more on our blog here: firedrill.