The key point of conducting a red team assessment is to demonstrate how real-world attackers can combine seemingly unrelated exploits not only to the security infrastructure but also with the employees and geographical location of the organization to achieve their goals.
WHAT IS RED TEAMING IN CYBER SECURITY
Red Teams are security professionals who analyze and test an organization’s systems and the environment by identifying vulnerabilities and launching an attack in a simulated environment. It is a cybersecurity assessment that simulates a real-life attack to help discover and measure how well an organization can endure any cyber threats and malicious attackers.
The key point of conducting a red team assessment is to demonstrate how real-world attackers can combine seemingly unrelated exploits not only to the security infrastructure but also with the employees and geographical location of the organization to achieve their goals.
During a red team assessment, a highly skilled security professional will typically launch a various range of attacks to leverage any vulnerabilities within an organization’s environment. Some of the techniques required and practiced during a red team assessment vary from standard phishing attempts targeting internal employees and social engineering to impersonating employees with the goal of obtaining admin rights.
To conduct an effective red team assessment, the security professional involves needs to know all the tactics, techniques, and procedures an attacker would use. Red team assessment is an effective way to demonstrate that even the most sophisticated firewall and complex security protocols implemented will mean nothing if an attacker can walk right into the data center and compromise the organization’s assets.
RED TEAM VS BLUE TEAM
Red teams are offensive security professionals that use simulated attacks to gauge the strength of the organization’s existing security capabilities and are experts in attacking systems and breaking into their defenses.
Blue teams are defensive security professionals responsible for maintaining internal network defenses against all cyber-attacks and threats. This group consists of incident response consultants who provide guidance to the IT security team on where to make improvements to stop sophisticated types of cyberattacks and threats.
CLOUD SECURITY
Cloud refers to the delivery of services, hardware, software, and storage that runs on the internet instead of locally hosting it. There are three types of cloud-based service types; Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Most cloud services can be accessed through common web browsers and mobile devices.
The advantage of the cloud is that user can access their data from anywhere using any device that has an internet connection. The benefits of rapid deployment, flexibility, low up-front costs, and scalability in the digital world have led many organizations to migrate their assets and data into the cloud. Cloud is becoming a new agenda as businesses and organizations are transitioning to a more holistic end-to-end transformation with cloud as its core.
For businesses making the transition to the cloud, robust cloud security is of vital importance. Security threats and malicious attackers are constantly evolving and are becoming more complex and skilled, so cloud computing is no less at risk than locally hosted assets. The security of data in the cloud becomes increasingly important as we move our devices, services, data center, business processes, and more to the cloud.
As of 2021, some of the major Cloud Service Providers are AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, and Alicloud. Cloud service providers often also function across geographical jurisdictions. Data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require that the data processors as well as the data controllers, meet the requirements of the regulation.
WHY RED TEAM TESTING THE CLOUD?
Cloud security offers many benefits including centralized security, reduced cost, reduced administration, reliability, and many more. Ensuring quality cloud data security is accomplished through comprehensive security policies, an organization implementation of security culture, and cloud security controls. However, due to the emergence of new technologies, attack surfaces also increases exponentially.
Red teaming in the cloud is the process to assess the strength and weaknesses of the cloud system environment to improve the overall security position. Most of the items included during a red team assessment methodology may cover items like applications, virtualizations, APIs, networks, automation, compliance, and data access. The rules of engagement for penetration testing and red team assessment may differ according to the types of service providers.
CLOUD SECURITY THREATS
Red team assessment of the cloud can help prevent most of these common types of cloud security threats. Some of the common vulnerabilities found during an assessment of the cloud are
- Cross-Site Request Forgery
- Side-Channel Attack
- Signature Wrapping Attacks
- Session hijacking using XSS
- SQL injection attack
- Denial of Service or Distributed Denial of service attack
- Cryptanalysis attacks
- Misconfigurations
- Malware/Ransomware
- Weak Access Management
SUMMARY
Cloud penetration testing helps organizations improve their overall cloud security, avoid breaches, and achieve compliance thereby gaining trust and reputation. It is of vital importance to understand the scope of an organization’s cloud services and assets and how to best approach cloud security assessment within the context of your organization’s obligation and risk. We at Walnut Security Services have a team of cloud-focused expertise to help your internal team and will understand the technical and legal aspects while testing your cloud environment.
