Virtual training

The Role of Virtual Environments in Red Team vs Blue Team Exercises

Annie Reiss

Oct 31, 2024 - 3 min read

You don’t really know how good your security is until you see how it performs under fire. But that doesn’t mean you need to wait for a cyber-incident. It’s better that you iron out the wrinkles with a simulated crisis. 

That way, when your business faces a real emergency, you’ll be prepared. There’s a few ways you can go about this. One of the most effective, however, involves bringing in a third party to work in collaboration with your security team. This is often referred to as as red team vs. blue team exercises.

In this post, we’ll cover the basics of red team vs. blue team exercises, what’s involved with them, and why a virtual environment is a must for these exercises. 

What is a Red vs. Blue Team Exercise? 

The best way to explain red and blue team exercises is to define the two teams — and their respective roles. 

Red Team: The Attackers 

A red team attempts to break into your business’s network by using the same tactics as real-world threat actors. It’s usually external to your organization, made up of ethical hackers working for a specialized vendor. The end goal of a red team exercise is to identify and patch holes in your security before someone with more nefarious motives can exploit them. 

Blue Team: The Defense

The blue team consists of your own internal personnel. This could be your security team, your IT department, or both. In a traditional red team exercise, once the red team has finished its simulated attack, they’ll send a report for the blue team to review. 

Red Versus Blue

In a red and blue team exercise, the two teams work more directly with one another. 

The red team actively attempts to break into the business’s network while the blue team tries to stop them. The exercise usually starts with a specific threat or type of attack. Then, once the exercise is done, the two teams come together to discuss how things went, forming what’s known as a purple team in the process. 

This ultimately gives you a much clearer view of your security posture than a simple penetration test or security assessment. 

You’re not only identifying potential vulnerabilities in your technical infrastructure, but also weaknesses in your incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans. It also tests your business’s threat-monitoring capabilities by measuring how quickly your blue team is able to identify the red team. Finally, a red and blue team exercise can reveal gaps in employee training — such as a security professional failing to recognize a DDOS attack as a smokescreen for data exfiltration activity.

Cybersecurity Labs: Virtual Playgrounds for Security Simulations

So, now that you know a bit more about what a red vs. blue team exercise involves, let’s talk about how virtual environments factor into the equation. See, the problem with running a security simulation using your real-world infrastructure is that the red team’s pretty limited in what they can actually do. They can probe for vulnerabilities and test out your business’s overall security awareness, but that’s about it. If you want to test something like how well you’re able to respond to a ransomware attack, well…you can’t exactly release ransomware into your real-world network. Instead, you’ll want to use a virtual cybersecurity lab. That’ll give the red team a completely sandboxed and controlled simulation of your ecosystem in which to run wild while your blue team attempts to stop them, providing a way more convincing simulation overall.

Why Are Virtual Environments Beneficial for Red vs. Blue Team Testing?

We already touched on the main reason virtual environments are a great fit for cybersecurity exercises. Digital simulations let you test a way larger set of scenarios than would be possible with your own infrastructure. This comes with some significant benefits for your security posture: 

• You get to see how your team would perform in a real cyberattack. 
• Your team gets real, hands-on experience. 
• You can test your defenses against the latest malware and ransomware without any risk of your real-world infrastructure being infected. 
• You can measure performance through the use of built-in analytics and reporting tools. 
• You can spin up as many different exercises as you like, letting you test a wide variety of different threats and attacks.

Learn More About Virtual Labs and Simulations

You now have a pretty good idea of how red vs blue team exercises work, and why virtual environments are an excellent place to run them. Next, we recommend reading up on some of the key differences between virtual training labs and simulations.