Red teaming refers to a multi stage full scope attack scenario performed with authorization in order to simulate the real world attack performed by hackers.This is a way for security analysts and pentesters to assess an organization’s security level.
This assessments includes:
- Testing the technologies used in their organization.
- Employees of the company.
- Physical flaws in their offices, warehouses and key places like server rooms.
During their assessment, a real world attack scenario performs to its full potential in order to make sure the organization can withstand the attacks if performed with an intention of complete demolition.
Organizations pay for these Red Teaming to attack them from all aspects, Ironic isn’t it?
If you are a small organization and if you think, Red Teaming are out of your league due to your scale, this is the thought which will put your organization into risk.
Since you are least expecting the attack and the attacker thinks you as a small organization to have decent security,you are placing yourself in a big risk of becoming an easy victim.
It is not necessary that always an attacker needs your data.Most of the time they might use your systems to perform attacks on other systems or even turn your system into bots to take over them later on.
Red teaming services are not over just with discovery of threats. They extend their service until the organization fixes the flaw and a re-test is also complete to ensure a complete re-enforcement.
They perform full fledged testing over networks,phone lines,lock picking,social engineering,camera and security alarm bypass,text/email attacks.
Using an outdated server without security patches, obsolete versions of security checks will be useless like the lock shown above. It can be easily broke up with modern tools, seamlessly.
Bug Bounties
Hunter and Ready initiates the first familiar bug bounty program in 1983.Since then, it is being organize by a lot of organizations to ensure their privacy and security in terms of their application and servers.
This is basically a contest organize in order to find out the flaws that were unnotice by the employees since development is such a field where one’s mistake will not be visible to them unless it is spot by some other person.
Companies will pay a decent amount of bounty if a bug is found in their system and upon the risk level, the amount can be more.
People who join these contests are white hat hackers and other cyber security enthusiasts,who will try to penetrate the system and let the people of the organization know the vulnerabilities present in the system.
Later on it will be fix by releasing a security patch for that vulnerability. Few companies will also mention the bounty hunter who successfully penetrated their system in the hall of fame as a part of the reward.
Process:
Initially, dates for the contest and tools that should and should not be use will be mention clearly in the poster to publish it in all media platforms.
When the contest starts, details about the scope of testing and privacy policies will be given.
if the bounty hunters go out the scope or disclose any private data are secure under the privacy policies they will be subject to serious lawsuits.
Once a bug is found, it has to be documented properly and the details about the process should not be published unless the company permits you or a security patch is released.
Many people misused the bug bounties to use that opportunity to know about the vulnerabilities and sell them in black markets.
Maximum bounties paid by famous companies
- Google paid a whopping $7,00,000 for chrome OS vulnerability.
- Facebook paid $20,000 for a bug.
- Microsoft paid $1,00,000 for windows 8.1 attack vulnerability.
- Apple paid $50,000 for an IOS firmware bug.
Written By: D.Hari Haran
Reviewed By: Sayan Chatterjee
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