Have you ever played computer games such as Halo or Gears of War? If yes, then you’ve noticed a game mode called Capture the Flag, which pits two teams against each other. One team, in our case “blue”, is responsible for protecting the flag from opponents who are trying to steal it.
This type of exercise is also often used by organizations to assess their ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber-attacks. As you probably already guessed, this defensive team is usually the “Blue Team”, but the attacking team is usually the “Red Team”.
Such simulations are extremely important because they allow us to identify weaknesses in systems, employees, and processes of organizations long before attackers do so in a real attack. This means that the organization will also have some time to correct these weak points.
By simulating real-life cyberattacks, these exercises, also known as “Red Teaming,” allow security professionals to improve their incident response procedures and strengthen their defenses against emerging threats.
In this article, we’ll take a general look at how the two opposing teams interact with each other, as well as what open-source tools the defense side can use.
More about assigning commands
The Red Team always plays the role of the attacker and uses tactics that reflect the tactics of the real members of the potential hacker group. By identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities, bypassing an organization’s defenses, and compromising its systems, this adversarial modeling provides an organization with invaluable insight into all the cracks in its cybersecurity.
Meanwhile, Blue Team takes on the role of defender as its goal is to detect and stop enemy incursions. Digital defense involves deploying various cybersecurity tools, monitoring network traffic for any anomalies or suspicious patterns, reviewing logs generated by various systems and applications, monitoring and collecting data from individual endpoints, and quickly responding to any signs of unauthorized access or suspicious behavior.
By the way, there is also a purple team (Purple Team), which relies on a joint approach and combines both offensive and defensive actions. By strengthening communication and collaboration between offensive and defensive teams, Purple Team enables organizations to identify vulnerabilities, test security controls, and improve their overall security posture through an even more comprehensive and unified approach.
Real tools for blue teams
Returning to the Blue Team, it is worth noting that this party responsible for the digital defense of the organization uses many open-source tools as well as proprietary tools to carry out its mission. Next, we’ll look at some of the most useful and common tools in several categories.
Network Analysis Tools
1. Arkime
Designed to efficiently process and analyze network traffic data, Arkime is a large-scale packet search and capture (PCAP) system.
It has an intuitive web interface for viewing, searching, and exporting PCAP files, and its API allows you to directly load and use session data in PCAP and JSON format while allowing data integration with specialized traffic collection tools such as Wireshark.
Arkime is designed to be deployed across multiple systems simultaneously and can scale to handle tens of gigabits of traffic per second. Processing large volumes of data using PCAP depends on the available disk space of the sensor and the scale of the Elasticsearch cluster. Both of these features can be scaled as needed as they are both under full administrator control.
2. Snort
Snort is an open-source intrusion prevention system (IPS) that monitors and analyzes network traffic to detect and prevent potential security threats.
Widely used for real-time traffic analysis and packet logging, Snort uses a set of rules that help identify malicious activity on a network and allow it to find packets that match suspicious or malicious behavior. When such behavior is detected, the system generates warnings for administrators.
According to the project page, Snort has three main use cases:
- package tracking;
- packet logging (useful for debugging network traffic);
- network intrusion prevention system (IPS).
To detect intrusions and malicious activity on the network, Snort has three sets of global rules:
- rules for community users: those rules that are available to any user without any action or registration.
- rules for registered users: By registering with Snort, a user can gain access to a specific set of rules optimized to detect much more specific threats.
- subscriber rules: This set of rules not only allows you to more accurately identify threats and optimize them, but also provides the ability to receive threat updates.
Incident Management Tools
3.TheHive
TheHive is a scalable security incident response platform that provides a collaborative and customizable space for incident handling, investigation, and response.
TheHive is tightly integrated with MISP (Malware Intelligence Sharing Platform) and facilitates the tasks of the Security Operations Center (SoC), Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), and any other professionals facing security incidents that need to be quickly analyzed and dealt with accordingly.
Three features make TheHive extremely useful:
- Cooperation. The platform facilitates real-time collaboration between SOC and CERT analysts. This facilitates the integration of ongoing investigations into cases, tasks, and observed objects. Participants can access up-to-date information, and special notifications about new MISP events, alerts, email reports, and SIEM integrations to further improve communication.
- Development. The tool simplifies the creation of cases and related tasks thanks to an efficient template engine. All metrics and fields can be configured using a special dashboard, and the platform itself supports a system for flagging files containing malware or suspicious data.
- Performance. Up to a thousand observables can be added to each case created, including the ability to import them directly from a MISP event or an alert sent to the platform, as well as custom classification and filters.
GRR Rapid Response is an incident response platform that enables rapid, remote forensic analysis. It remotely collects and analyzes forensic data from systems to facilitate cybersecurity investigations and incident response efforts.
GRR supports the collection of various types of forensic data, including file system metadata, memory contents, registry information, and other data that is critical to incident analysis. The GRR platform is designed for large-scale deployments, making it especially suitable for enterprises with a diverse and extensive IT infrastructure.
GRR consists of two parts: client and server:
- The GRR client is deployed to the systems that need to be examined. In each of these systems, once deployed, the GRR client periodically polls the GRR front-end servers to ensure they are running. “Work” means performing certain actions: downloading a file, listing a directory, etc.
- The GRR server infrastructure consists of several components, including interfaces, workflows, UI servers, Fleetspeak, etc. It provides a graphical interface and API endpoint that allows analysts to schedule customer actions and view and process collected data.
Operating system analysis tools
5. HELK
The HELK platform, or The Hunting ELK, is designed to provide security professionals with a comprehensive environment for proactive threat hunting, security event analysis, and incident response. It leverages the capabilities of the ELK stack along with additional tools to create a versatile and extensible security analytics platform.
HELK combines various cybersecurity tools into a single platform for threat hunting and analytics. Its main components are Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, which are widely used for logging and data analysis. HELK extends the ELK stack by integrating additional security tools and data sources to enhance threat detection and incident response capabilities.
The purpose of the HELK platform is primarily research, but thanks to its flexible design and core components, it can be deployed in larger environments with the desired configurations and scalable infrastructure.
6. Volatility
Volatility Framework is a set of tools and libraries for extracting malicious instances from the target system’s RAM. It is widely used in digital forensics and incident response to analyze memory dumps of compromised systems and extract valuable information related to current or past security incidents.
Because Volatility is platform-independent, it supports memory dumps from a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. In addition, Volatility can also analyze memory dumps from virtualized environments such as VMware or VirtualBox and thus gain insight into both the physical and virtual state of the system.
Volatility’s architecture is plugin-based and comes with a wealth of plugins right out of the box. And given the ability to add custom plugins, Volatility can cover the widest possible range of forensic analysis.
Conclusion
Red Teaming is essential to assessing the readiness of an organization’s defenses and is vital to a robust and effective security strategy. The extensive information collected through these exercises gives organizations a holistic view of their security posture and allows them to evaluate the effectiveness of their security protocols.
Additionally, blue teams play a key role in cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, which is especially important in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
Team exercises also provide realistic training scenarios for security professionals, and this hands-on experience helps them hone their skills in responding to real incidents.
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