The only sure thing in life is change, which does not mean that anyone is exempt from it. In a digitized and technological environment it is important to adopt all the tools that can favor the development of companies, as well as to learn how to keep ourselves safe in the environment where we are connected daily, which can be vulnerable.
Hence the need for digital security, which is why every company that has been digitized must be trained so that their workers and the company itself, know how to protect themselves and how to act in the event of an attack.
In this article you will learn about two of the three teams that come into play when we talk about computer security and data protection:
- Red Team
- Blue Team
- Purple Team
What are they and how do they help IT security?
When it comes to IT security and data protection, two fundamental teams come into play: the Red team and the Blue team.
Both teams perform complementary work to:
- Detect vulnerabilities.
- Prevent computer attacks.
- Simulate threat scenarios.
Red Team
The members of this team (offensive security) are often confused with pentesters, but they are not the same, although there is some overlap between their skills and functions.
According to the Campusciberseguridad article, pentesting is an abbreviation formed by the words «penetration» and «testing» and is a practice/technique that consists of attacking different environments or systems in order to find and prevent possible failures in them.
Main functions of the Red team
They emulate attackers, but how? They use the same or similar tools, exploiting the security vulnerabilities of a company’s applications or systems, pivoting techniques and targets (systems and applications).
In the same sense, the emulation process is based on creating threat scenarios that an organization may face, analyzing security from the attackers’ point of view, in order to give the blue team the possibility of defending itself against attacks.
In this way, we can say that the Red team is a training for the Blue team, where the real ability of a company to protect its critical assets, detection and response capabilities is evaluated, considering the technological, process and human levels.
Blue Team
The Blue team (defensive security) is a security group that defends organizations from attacks proactively.
Its functions
- They perform constant vigilance: they analyze unusual patterns and behaviors (at the level of systems and applications as well as people), in terms of information security.
- They work to ensure continuous security improvement:
- Tracking cybersecurity incidents.
- Analyzing systems and applications to identify flaws and vulnerabilities.
- Verifying the effectiveness of the company’s security measures.
Consequently, the Blue team’s main objective is to carry out assessments of the different threats that may affect companies, monitor (network, systems, etc.) and recommend action plans to mitigate risks. Likewise, in case of incidents, this team performs the response tasks, including a «forensic analysis» of the affected machines, traceability of the attack vectors, proposal of solutions and establishment of detection measures for future cases.
Now that we know about the Red team and the Blue team, in the next article we will tell you about the Purple team!