In the rapidly evolving technological world that we live in it is a constant struggle to keep yourself and your organisation's resources secure. As the cyber security landscape expands, so do the security assessment procedures employed to best prepare against everchanging threats.
Penetration testing and red team assessments have become the main way of testing the technical infrastructure and security resilience of an organisation. While both exercises contain common elements, they differ drastically in scope and approach.
A penetration test PT is a tool-assisted manual assessment to exploit one or more vulnerabilities to test how far an attacker would be able to penetrate into an organisation. PTs can be goal oriented, or more open-ended in nature. Standard penetration testing focuses on assessing networks, systems, web apps, mobile devices etc.
When compared to red teaming, it is important to highlight that PTs do not often focus on stealth or evasion, instead the organisation and security team is typically aware of testing. The main benefit of this being, pen testers can put all of their focus on identifying as many vulnerabilities as possible, as little time would be spent in understanding the intrusion detection infrastructure. A red team RT campaign is a threat-led penetration test where also the detection and response capabilities of the organisation typically within your Security Operations Centre or SOC, and referred to as the Blue Team are tested during the RT campaign.
Typically, this test is run secretly, and specific attack scenarios are often agreed upon upfront. Red teaming, in contrast to penetration testing, is focused on target objectives.
