Tribe of Hackers Red Team. Marcus J. Carey
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on a blue team at a hospital and then at a bank, I would consider how an adversary would get around the controls we had in place. So naturally I began performing offensive tests against our own controls to see where we were missing things. It was integral for me to learn as much as possible about every single layer of the organization. Everything from firewall rules to router configs to host-based protections to physical security to managing risk associated with one-off exceptions for C-suite members to protecting data to stopping people from getting phished—these were all opportunities for me to find where protections were lacking. Through all of this I learned what pitfalls many organizations and blue teams face day to day.
From an operational standpoint, understanding the struggles blue teams have to deal with, how networks function, and what defensive controls are possible provides a much clearer picture to the offensive operator. I pivoted to an offensive role in 2014 when I started working at Black Hills Information Security. Throughout the first few years of working there, I performed many penetration tests for various organizations. This gave me the opportunity to tune my capabilities and develop red team tactics. Within the last three years, I have been fortunate enough to be assigned formal red team engagements.
What is the best way to get a red team job?
Being on a red team takes a unique and dedicated individual who has knowledge in vastly different areas. I’m a firm believer that one should not jump directly into an offensive role without first getting a deep understanding of underlying protocols, including not only technical details but also business logic. Do you know how the business you are targeting functions day to day? Can you determine what the organization values?
Many red teams consist of multiple individuals with skills in different areas. You might see team members who can perform architecture setup, payload delivery, and/or social engineering, act as internal network specialists, and more. Before you get a job on a red team, I would recommend first developing offensive skills in multiple areas on penetration tests. The key to being a good red teamer is having the knowledge to attack an organization from many angles and the discipline to use the one method that is necessary and won’t get you caught.
“The key to being a good red teamer is having the knowledge to attack an organization from many angles and the discipline to use the one method that is necessary and won’t get you caught.”
If you are already a pentester looking for a red team role, I would say networking is probably going to be your best bet. Go out and meet the people working on red teams and introduce yourself. Show them projects you’ve been working on. I see job openings posted by others on my Twitter timeline all the time.
If you are working for a company as an internal security analyst or the like and your company doesn’t have an internal red team, maybe it’s time to make a case for one. You might be able to build your own internal red team for your own organization and essentially create your own red team role.
How can someone gain red team skills without getting in trouble with the law?
For building skills, I am a huge advocate of participating in capture-the-flag contests. Also, jumping in on bug bounties is a good way to build web application hacking skills. Building a home lab doesn’t have to be expensive and can provide you with a test platform for performing red team research without breaking laws.
Why can’t we agree on what a red team is?
I think many have a hard time understanding where a pentest stops and a red team starts. There is definitely some overlap between the two that people get hung up on. Commonly people describe red team engagements as a penetration test without restrictions. But red team engagements do have restrictions. If they didn’t, then kidnapping, extortion, and blackmail would be in the rules of engagement. So since red teams are not truly unrestricted, I think people have a hard time grasping why it’s different from a pentest.
What is one thing the rest of information security doesn’t understand about being on a red team? What is the most toxic falsehood you have heard related to red, blue, or purple teams?
For the majority, I think they still think red teams are trying to sling exploits with Metasploit. I haven’t had to use an actual software exploit in years. Configuration issues, bad passwords, and poor user awareness of phishing are typically how we get in. Once inside a network, it is 100 percent a game of credentials: pivot, dump creds, pivot, dump creds, rinse, and repeat.
I think the most toxic thing I’ve seen is how some blue teamers and red teamers treat each other. Many treat the other side as an adversary in a bad way. Our job as red teamers is to help the blue team get better. We should never gloat about our ops. The same goes for the blue team. I love purple team assessments where we can work collectively to make the organization better. Some of the coolest things I’ve found on engagements have been on purple team engagements.
When should you introduce a formal red team into an organization’s security program?
Only after an organization has gone through multiple penetration tests and has done their due diligence in mitigating any of the vulnerabilities presented to them would I consider recommending a red team engagement. The most important thing to consider when deciding whether an organization is ready for a red team engagement is, can a red team get in using a vulnerability that shows up in a pentest? If so, the organization is not ready for a red team. The organization should already have an internal social engineering program to ensure its users don’t submit credentials to a malicious page the red team hosts. Solid alerting and hardening of infrastructure should be in place, and I damn well better not find an exposed portal that doesn’t have MFA.
How do you explain the value of red teaming to a reluctant or nontechnical client or organization?
Explaining the fact that it is a true test of their defensive capabilities usually is effective for me. I like to describe a pentest to a customer by explaining that I am going to attempt to find as many vulnerabilities as I can but will likely be very noisy. I explain that on red team engagements I may find only a few vulnerabilities but will be much less noisy and those vulnerabilities will likely be much more valuable to them, as they probably allowed me to compromise the network.
What is the least bang-for-your-buck security control that you see implemented?
For the most part, if you are paying for antivirus, it is the least bang-for-your-buck control. I say that because, honestly, the free Windows Defender that comes installed by default on Windows systems is actually pretty good for doing what antivirus is supposed to do.
Have you ever recommended not doing a red team engagement?
Yes, during scoping calls, if I sense that the customer hasn’t done previous pentests or struggles to conceptualize what a red team is, then I might recommend something else. Definitions are huge in this industry. Without the proper definitions being agreed upon, it can be difficult to determine if by red team they actually mean pentest or even vulnerability scan. Laying out these definitions usually results in a customer realizing they meant a pentest instead of a red team.
What’s the most important or easiest-to-implement control that can prevent you from compromising a system or network?
One of the easiest-to-implement controls that makes our lives hard as red teamers is Microsoft’s Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). Randomizing local administrator passwords on every system makes it so that the compromise of a single local admin credential doesn’t allow widespread access to every other asset in the network. Network segmentation between hosts, including client isolation so workstations can’t talk to other workstations is another great control to have in place. If I can’t pivot from one workstation to another, it’s going to be hard for me to escalate privileges in the domain.
Even though this question asked for only one control, I would say the following are the most important things to look at locking down to prevent full domain compromise: MFA everywhere you can implement it, VPN requiring