Hiring several bug hunters to break into your network after spending a massive amount of money trying to secure it doesn’t make much sense. Practically, it might seem like a waste of effort and money, but in certain situations, the best way to find hidden vulnerabilities in your infrastructure is to conduct simulated attacks on it.
Penetration tests and automated red teaming services are used by many companies to look into client networks through the lens of an attacker. They aim to probe and poke at your systems, to know how its defense works, and look for weaknesses that would allow an attacker to access your data or sabotage your systems.
Unlike penetration tests that cover narrow spectrums, red teaming involves a full-scale assault on your entire network. It might take time to collect all the information but the information generated from these methods can go a long way towards completely securing your networks.
Security teams often prefer automated red teaming over manual processes because of its error-free, continuous, and automated process.
Security Benefits That Come With Hiring a Red Team:
1. Identify vulnerabilities in applications and systems:
One of the biggest reasons why companies consider red teams is that they can quickly identify any vulnerabilities in the software and systems. An automated red team exercise can show you any vulnerabilities that exist in your entire system and how it can be exploited.
Many firms offering such services use customized tools and attacking methods to find loopholes in your systems. The goal of these tests is to simulate a persistent attack on targeted assets to see what might give.
Depending on the level of comprehensiveness, a red team process can focus on finding anything, including disruptive vulnerabilities. An automated red team does not stop until it has found every last threat or vulnerability that your defense systems might have.
2. Fresh and Important Perspectives:
By hiring a security firm to look into your network, you allow a fresh pair of eyes to look into the data and security. The service providers often come in with the perspective of a potential attacker and look for ways by which your network could be exploited. People on your internal teams tend to probe the same spot repeatedly because of their familiarity with the software. People looking at your structures for the first time can tell you about something you didn’t even realize or bother looking for.
3. Understand the impact of a security breach
A red team exercise can help you in identifying the impact of a compromise or a breach in your systems. It will expose the ways that an attacker could reach into your servers and breach your defenses. This will also help the red team explain what kind of assets of the business could be damaged and what impact that could create.
A thorough exercise will map out the assets and show you how an attack on one thing could impact multiple other processes. They can also help you point towards any financial or legal implications of a breach on specific systems of your structure.
4. Find weaknesses in your development or testing procedures:
An automated and continuous attack will expose the flaws in your development and testing process as well. If a test reveals bugs in a product, it is clear that something about the process doesn’t work. By hiring a red team, you can also see where your testing process is falling short.
Large organizations especially have mature software development practices solely dedicated to identifying the flaws or loopholes throughout the product’s lifecycle. If the red team exercise still finds vulnerabilities, organizations will know exactly where they need to direct their resources and effort.
5. Test your incident response:
These exercises offer great opportunities for companies to test out their real-time incident response functions. When done in conjunction with a blue team exercise, you can test your response functions more accurately. With this, you will have a chance to observe how well your system can detect and mitigate against a threat and how quick your responses are.
Hiring a security firm that provides automated red teaming is a great option for you to tighten your security systems. If your company or product has been breached in the past, you will already have a brief idea about how well your current systems can handle them. After considering these facts, if you feel like your system is falling behind and leaves you open to threats, you need to act quickly.
Find a credible security firm with good reviews. The quality of credibility of the people with free access to your networks makes a huge difference in how effective these services are.
