What is Red Teaming?

 

 

 Red Teaming

Red teaming is the practice of rigorously challenging plans, policies, systems and assumptions by adopting an adversarial approach. A red team may be a contracted external party or an internal group that uses strategies to encourage an outsider perspective.
The goal of red teaming is to overcome cognitive errors such as groupthink and confirmation bias, which can impair the decision-making or critical thinking ability of an individual or organization.

A red team is often a group of internal IT employees used to simulate the actions of those who are malicious or adversarial. From a cybersecurity perspective, a red team's goal is to breach or compromise a company's digital security. A blue team, on the other hand, is a group of internal IT employees used to simulate the actions of individuals within a given company or organization, often a security team. If the red team poses as a group of cybercriminals, the blue team's goal is to stop them from committing a hypothetical data breach. This type of interaction is what is known as a red team-blue team simulation.

Red teaming, however, does not exclusively require the existence of a blue team. In fact, this can often be a purposeful decision to compare the active and passive systems of an agency.
Red teaming originated in the military to realistically evaluate the strength and quality of strategies by using an external perspective. Since then, red teaming has become a common cybersecurity training exercise used by organizations in the public and private sectors. Other security testing methods include ethical hacking and penetration testing, or pen testing.