The team that ensures the strength of network security defenses.
Penetration Testing ServicesA blue team is responsible for ensuring a network's defenses are in proper working order so that a security organization can effectively defend against threats. The blue team also can work in tandem with a red team in a penetration testing scenario of an internal security organization’s defenses or those of an external customer.
According to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology, a blue team “conducts operational network vulnerability evaluations and provides mitigation techniques to customers who have a need for an independent technical review of their network security posture.
The blue team identifies security threats and risks in the operating environment and, in cooperation with the customer, analyzes the network environment and its current state of security readiness. Based on the blue team’s findings and expertise, they provide recommendations that integrate into an overall community security solution to increase the customer's cybersecurity readiness posture. Oftentimes a blue team ensures a customer's networks are as secure as possible before having a red team test its systems.”
For context, red team exercises are – you guessed it – the scenario that finds security professionals stepping into the attacker role to attempt to breach a customer’s defenses. After the red team has been hired, these “nefarious “ actions are taken at a time unbeknownst to the customer so that the entire scenario mimics real-world attacks as much as possible.
It's necessary for a blue team to bring a wealth of network defense knowledge to its operations. Whether the team is conducting assessments in tandem with, prior to, or after red team exercises, the goal is the same: to practice exposure management and mitigate vulnerabilities in a network to ensure it’s ready to hold up against threat actors.
Each security organization will have unique needs when engaging a blue team, but let’s take a look at a general mix of skills that needs to come to the table.
Ensuring the security of the network is perhaps the most critical function of the blue team and includes knowledge of network protocols and architecture, firewall configuration and management, network traffic analysis, and virtual private networks (VPNs).
Blue teams should place emphasis on expertise in security information and event management (SIEM) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms. However, individuals also need to be able to leverage knowledge of things like vulnerability scanners, packet analyzers, and automation tools.
When it comes to threat intelligence, it’s critical a blue team is able to understand the playbooks of threat actors and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and the indicators of compromise (IoCs) those tactics can create when a network is breached. Also, being proactive about threat intelligence stops more attacks and ends up saving the business more money.
A blue team's main purview is to find vulnerabilities and exposed vector points along a network and either recommend remediation to the customer or take corrective action on their behalf. However, it’s also critical a blue team bring to the table incident response expertise around aspects like digital forensics, malware, and triage.
Blue teaming can significantly increase an organization's security posture, potentially helping to create a culture of readiness and proactivity in the face of mounting threats. Let's take a look at some of the more obvious benefits successful blue team exercises can impart.
When attempting to connect the potential ways in which a blue team would work hand-in-hand with a red team, we might assume that relationship wouldn’t exist at all, with one side taking on the attacker role and the other taking on the network defender role.
Each team would then report findings to their client – without ever speaking to one another – and the client would then be better off with all of that insightful data from both teams. That sounds like it could be right, but it’s only one way of doing things. Let’s take a look at some of the ways blue and red teams can work together.
The type of team is not a result of simply combining red and blue teams. Rather, a purple team is typically tasked with facilitating communication and cooperation between both teams in a penetration testing format where red teams are sharing their TTPs with blue teams and blue teams are sharing defensive actions with red teams.
Naturally, there are some roadblocks to information sharing between these two understandably competitive teams. Team blue doesn't want to give away how they catch the bad guys, and team red doesn't want to give away the secrets of the "dark arts."
By breaking down those walls purple teams can show team blue how they can be better defenders by understanding how team red operates. And team red will hopefully see how they can enhance their effectiveness by expanding their knowledge of defensive operations in partnership with team blue.
Building an effective blue team will look different for each security organization, but the effort typically begins with defining the objective(s) of the forthcoming blue team. Is it a one-time exercise or will there be a continuous movement, iterating to ensure a strong network security posture in the face of ever-evolving threats?
From there, an organization might move on to identifying the core roles that can execute the defined objectives. These roles might include:
A third step in blue team development might see the organization establishing a set of best practices by which the team should operate. In the world of network defense testing, there is no stone that should be left unturned – because one of those stones might be hiding a vulnerability through which an attacker could wreak havoc.
Best practices might include establishing communication patterns (i.e. meeting cadence, emergent threat alerts, etc.), cross training team members, establishing collaborative reporting/debriefs, and maintaining current playbooks and asset inventories.
A last general step in the process of cementing the effectiveness of your new blue team would be to establish a set of metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) by which the team can baseline the effectiveness of its operations, measure progress, and continuously improve. These metrics might include:
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