The 5 Differences Between Blue Team and Red Team

Blue team vs red team – what are the differences between these two terms, and how do they work together to prevent cyberattacks? First, let’s examine the definitions of blue team and red team so that we can better understand their roles and goals. Then, we’ll look at five key ways in which blue team vs red team differ. By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what makes blue team vs red team tick, and how these two groups help keep your company safe from cyberattacks.

1) Blue teams are based on principles

Blue teams pride themselves on being by-the-book when it comes to security. They follow best practices as determined by NIST or other recognized bodies, they use industry standard tools like Nessus, Metasploit, etc., they hold annual security training, they publish vulnerability reports every so often. While there’s nothing wrong with these activities (and some organizations require them), there are differences between a blue team and a red team that can affect how useful both are in a red/blue scenario.

2) Blue teams do training scenarios

There are many organizations that do blue team vs red team exercises to build security skills for security testers, admins and developers. Security professionals use these exercises to practice incident response procedures when things go wrong or as a pre-launch verification of systems security. They might also be used to catch internal insider threats with your own employees. As you can imagine, there is lots of overlap with DevOps testing and blue team practices like penetration testing, but there are some pretty big differences too. Here are some things that differentiate blue teams from red teams:…

3) Red teams do live attacks

Blue teams run attacks on systems to assess what vulnerabilities are present, but red teams do more than just static analysis. A red team will attempt to exploit those vulnerabilities in order to prove that they can be exploited. They’ll even use blue team tools like vulnerability scanners to figure out how they could exploit a system. Blue teams report on these vulnerabilities, but red teams also take it one step further by attempting to exploit them in order to make sure they can be exploited before an attack occurs in real life.

4) Red teams use specialized tools

Blue teams use specialized tools to help them hack into company systems; these include vulnerability scanners, packet analyzers, port scanners, and virtual machines. Red teams may have similar tools but they also have more advanced hacking tools such as exploit frameworks (examples of which are Metasploit and Canvas) that make exploiting vulnerabilities much easier. Blue team members also typically lack a detailed knowledge of how an organization’s IT system works. This allows red teamers to fake their way through tasks without having to know all of the details.

5) Blue team members have different roles than red team members

Blue team members are generally employees of a company, while red team members are outsiders. Blue team members are also more familiar with their own organization’s structure than red team members. Finally, blue teams have typically been involved in planning out or putting together what they’re trying to defend against; red teams typically come into a situation with little knowledge of what they’re working against. However, both red teams and blue teams take their cues from leadership on how much information to divulge about themselves. The key is for one group to mimic an adversary—and for those being mimicked not to know which group is which!