Businesses hire external professionals or internal teams perform vulnerability assessment along with penetration tests to verify the security posture of an IT environment. But there is a specific type of a wargaming activity that is considered to be more effective to evaluate & discover strength of security in place: the red team vs. blue team exercise.
Red Team and Blue Team Concepts
The red team is a specialized team of external cyber security professionals. These professionals attempt to compromise security controls of your environment to show where their weaknesses are. And the blue team is a specialized internal security team responsible to prevent the red team from succeeding in their objective.
This exercise also includes the purple team whose job is to learn from the red team and pass the knowledge onto the blue team.
At times it is learnt that the red team analysts are part (internal only) of the same organization but they perform cyber attacks from outside of the organization. It is recommended that Organization shall hire an external entity because it represents real attackers better.
Difference between Penetration Testers and Red Team
In the world of cybersecurity, penetration testing is a one-time activity while red teaming is a continuous campaign.
Red team activities are also not limited to using penetration testing tools during the attack exercise. Red team is a continuous activity and members are always planning to evolve their methods & techniques (like hackers) on how they can get their hands on the sensitive data of the target. This activity by the red team involves social engineering techniques, phishing, and many more attack techniques.