Unleashing Synergy: How BAS Elevates Red Team and Blue Team Collaboration

For over 10 years, Red Team operations have been deployed by numerous organizations, using different approaches, to meet a variety of objectives that sometimes diverge from their primary role. These offensive simulations now play an essential role in assessing the defenses put in place by the Blue Team, by testing their detection and reaction capabilities.

However, Breach and Attack Simulations (BAS) solutions are now a strategic complement to Red Teams. In a Purple Team approach, the automation and diversity of attacks enable broader coverage and more frequent execution of security tests, for more effective and regular testing of the defense. In this way, BAS do not replace Red Teams, but amplify their impact by ensuring continuous validation of the defense posture and making investigations more reactive and efficient.

Red Team operations reproduce realistic attacks from the point of view of an advanced adversary, in order to test an organization’s overall security posture. Their main objective is not to exploit as many vulnerabilities as possible, but to validate whether an advanced threat could reach its targets undetected.

Historically, they have focused on obtaining trophies (management emails, financial reports, HR documents, data from sensitive R&D activities, etc.), thus attesting to the feasibility of the attack. To achieve this, the Red Team identifies exploitable attack paths and bypasses protection mechanisms. Its approach is resolutely offensive, as its name suggests.

However, in the face of dwindling resources and an exponential increase in vulnerabilities, it is becoming difficult to identify and correct each and every security flaw one by one. The growth of the attack surface – due to the rise of software, the increasing complexity of systems and the pressure to innovate rapidly – limits the effectiveness of this traditional approach. It remains relevant, but needs to be complemented by other methods with a broader vision. If we consider that an adversary always has a chance of taking advantage of a vulnerability, it is imperative to focus on the next step: optimizing the detection and neutralization of attacks. This is the task of the Blue Team. The link between Red and Blue Teams is therefore essential: carry out attacks to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of defenses!

a) A strong focus on stealth

Many Red Teams prefer a stealthy approach, in line with the oft-heard adage: « A well-run Red Team is an undetected Red Team ». Red Teamers therefore seek to remain discreet and make their actions difficult to detect. However, not all organizations have the detection capacity to meet this challenge. It is therefore crucial to adapt the intensity of the noise generated, in order to evaluate each defense under appropriate conditions. A step-by-step approach enables detections to be validated against standard signals before stealth is increased. Automatic solutions are therefore a valuable ally here, as they offer greater granularity in terms of attack intensity and execution parameters.

b) Very direct attack paths

Unlike automated solutions that test several variants of an attack, the Red Team follows a precise path, adapting only when an obstacle prevents it from progressing. Once it has reached its objective, it highlights targeted, localized vulnerabilities, offering precise avenues for correction. However, a real attacker might take a different route, which means that the vulnerabilities discovered do not necessarily cover all possible attack scenarios. As a complement to this manual approach, BAS’s automatic solutions enable you to quickly test several variants of an attack and immediately compare the effectiveness of the detection of each of them.

c) A penchant for social engineering

Some of Red Team’s operations focus more on social engineering than on technical practices. And yet, Red Team’s expertise is much sought-after when it comes to dealing with complex technical issues corresponding to the behavior of advanced adversaries; and thus identifying weaknesses that are not limited to an employee clicking on a malicious PDF received by email. The human component remains a critical factor, but it deserves to be addressed differently.

d) Budget optimization constraints

A Red Team, although equipped, is carried out by human participants. The time spent is therefore a key factor, and one that the participants seek to optimize. This manual approach imposes certain constraints: it requires rigorous planning, qualified resources and significant execution time. Nor does it allow easy replay of a Red Team campaign to measure changes in the defenses deployed. BAS solutions that automate continuous, large-scale testing overcome this limitation. This makes it simpler and less costly to carry out regular control tests.

e) Towards a hybrid approach

BAS solutions automate the attack (Red) for the benefit of the defense (Blue). They are therefore part of a comprehensive Purple Team approach aimed at assessing and improving detection and response capabilities, as well as training SOC & CERT teams in their investigation and intervention tasks. As MISC magazine points out in its special issue no. 31: « The Purple Team is certainly beneficial for rapidly improving the SOC’s ability to detect the Red Team and better understand the course of attacks ». Beyond the cooperation between these dedicated cyber-security teams, exercises conducted with BAS also reinforce processes and reflexes with other IT players, making attack neutralization faster and more effective.

By deploying a comprehensive Purple Team approach, BAS complements Red Team and optimizes budget constraints by automating actions. This automation improves the regularity and depth of security testing, while lightening the load on human teams. Ultimately, this synergy boosts overall security efficiency and the resilience of organizations in the face of modern threats.