Can Red Teaming exercises be automated?#

Red teaming exercises are a critical part of an organization’s security posture, but they can be time consuming and expensive to execute. Can they be automated? The answer is…

it depends on where an organization is at.

The Automated Red Team#

There are a variety of commercial and free Red Team automation options available for enterprises with a low maturity level. As a means of testing incident prevention and detection controls, these tools repeat adversarial strategies and tactics.

Check some of them out:

These tools have the advantage of being simple to use and deploy, as well as providing quick value at a cheap cost. Automated tests can also help find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that would otherwise be missed.

Go ahead and fire all of these tools against a lab environment if you want to quickly examine whether some of your endpoint security rules are working!

The Human Red Team#

Human analysis, rather than automated tests, will help organizations with a higher level of cybersecurity maturity. The human Red Team’s worth lies in their capacity to think outside the box and offer engagements that are more realistic. A Red Team’s final analysis will also provide more complex insights that can be used to inform an organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy.

See also

Looking to expand your knowledge of red teaming? Check out our online course, MRT - Certified Red Teamer In this course, you’ll learn about the different aspects of red teaming and how to put them into practice.