Red Teaming: What It Is and How to Use It

Red Teaming: What It Is and How to Use It

Have you ever wondered how secure your home really is from burglars? Or how prepared you are to defend your property? A quick way to find out is to do a bit of red teaming. What is red teaming? Read on to find out.

Red teaming is basically where a team of people act as if they’re attempting to breach security in an effort to eliminate weaknesses. Companies use red teaming to find ways to minimize their risk of being hacked or having valuable information stolen. How does red teaming apply to survival?

Red Teaming and Survivalism

Red teaming can be applied to survivalism through exposing vulnerabilities in your operations security (OPSEC), protection of personal information (PERSEC), standard operating procedure (SOP), as well as technology, plans and physical security. The most common way to test your survival community’s, or even your home’s, security is to perform a mock attack on the property.

Executing a Red Team Exercise

To make the most of a red team exercise, follow these steps:

  1. The first step is to define the scope and explain what aspects of security you’re testing. Some people care about privacy, while others don’t. Survivalists should look for weaknesses in physical security.
  2. The next step will be to assemble a team. The individuals on the red team should be trained in opposing force (OPFOR), meaning they need to be specialists in penetrating all types of security. Now obviously, not everyone on a red team will have the same skill set, but that makes them harder to defend against.
  3. Step three is easy: You and your team need to run reconnaissance.
  4. The fourth step is when the fun begins and the red team gets to put their skills and plan into play, attempting to penetrate the blue team’s security.
  5. After they’ve either successfully completed their objective or met strong enough defenses to not finish the mission, it’s time to debrief. Red team needs to explain what they did, how they did it and why it worked. Blue team needs to explain why they either succeeded or failed in their objective of protecting whatever was vulnerable.
  6. The next step in the red teaming process is to implement change. The idea is to take what you learned about your security from the red team and reinforce those areas to make the security stronger.
  7. The final step is to rinse and repeat. Just because you found one vulnerability and fixed it doesn’t mean there aren’t more or that you’ve sufficiently strengthened the weak areas.

Red teaming is an excellent way to improve your security and train yourself. Your teams will see both sides of the battle, giving you an advantage. Check out how you can analyze your home defenses and see if you should consider having a red team test your security.

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