The fast-paced cybersecurity landscape we now find ourselves in requires more than just shoring one's defences but also making headway with proactive offence. One half of purple teaming, red teaming is the most well-known practice when it comes to offensive cybersecurity strategies, and it involves an organisation testing its cybersecurity effectiveness through an adversarial lens while removing defender bias from the process.

However, the manual and periodic nature of conventional red teaming does not cut it anymore for today's threats. This is where Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART) comes in to reshape how businesses approach their cybersecurity. Read on as we explore how CART represents a significant evolution to the practice of red teaming and how continuous automation can boost this cybersecurity strategy to new heights.

What is Continuous Automated Red Teaming?

The idea behind CART is to simulate sophisticated cyberattacks continuously to test and improve an organisation's defences by identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in real-time, which offers a highly proactive perspective in their red teaming efforts. It, therefore, diverges from conventional red teaming exercises by leveraging continuous testing and automation to provide a more thorough and much-needed dynamic approach to cybersecurity assessments.

In doing so, organisations not only broaden the scope of their testing but also enhance its frequency to ensure that their defences are always up to par against the latest cyberattacks and threat tactics. Moreover, CART's unique ability to autonomously deploy advanced attack techniques allows it to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps that may get overlooked in traditional tests.

How CART works

The core of CART is simulating real-world attacks in an ongoing and systematic manner and continuously probing a business's defences. In addition, it tests cybersecurity measures and retests them again and again to uncover the vulnerabilities that a real hacker could take advantage of. The CART process starts with mapping the business's digital footprint and mirroring the reconnaissance methodologies and tactics employed by adversaries, which include:

● Identifying open ports, exposed credentials, unprotected assets, vulnerable databases, and other potential entry points.

● Launching multi-stage attacks that work to discover blind spots and attack paths.

Also, one of the key benefits of CART compared to traditional red teaming is its capacity to perform extensive testing more regularly without manual intervention and not just on a limited set of targets. This approach forgoes the one-time event of its predecessor in favour of evaluating security systems as an ongoing process. Thus, it is better geared to adapt to new threats as soon as they are discovered and provides security teams with timely insights into the organisation's cybersecurity resilience. The end result is that CART allows for effective and immediate response strategies that benefit various teams within the company.

Benefits of CART in cybersecurity

CART offers many invaluable benefits to those looking to strengthen their cybersecurity posture against emerging cyber threats:

1. Proactive cybersecurity

By constantly identifying and addressing vulnerabilities, CART promotes an expedited and proactive approach to cybersecurity and ensures that one's defences are always ahead or at least in step with the evolving cyber threat landscape.

2. Complete coverage and total visibility

With its sophisticated features and tools, CART can provide extensive and all-around coverage of an organisation's entire IT infrastructure and offer a bird's-eye view of potential vulnerabilities and other security gaps.

3. Improved efficiency and resource optimisation

CART not only brings technical contributions when it automates manual and repetitive tasks but also helps IT teams to focus more on creative and meaningful tasks and strategic analysis, improving worker efficiency and maximising limited cybersecurity resources.

4. Relevance and timeliness

CART’s continuous nature guarantees the relevance of security assessments and that they reflect the latest attack methods and threat intelligence, resulting in a real-time feedback loop that facilitates swift adaptation and response to cyberthreats.

5. Enhanced detection and response

Continuously testing and monitoring an organisation's cybersecurity elevates its capacity to detect and respond to threats, which helps in mitigating risks more effectively and allows for prioritising which vulnerabilities require immediate resolution, streamlining their remediation efforts.

Conclusion

Keeping up with the evolving and increasingly sophisticated threat of cyberattacks requires stepping up one's strategy in dealing with them. CART certainly has made its case for how invaluable it is in modern cybersecurity, as it allows organisations to better their security defences non-stop while also broadening the scope of their testing.

Whether it is CART or any other advanced security solution, GROUP8 is the cyber intelligence company you can count on to bolster your cybersecurity posture. Our collection of offensive-inspired cybersecurity services in Singapore is not only backed by prominent AI technologies but also by information security and defence industry veterans. With this unbeatable combination at your fingertips, you can rest assured that your business can resist whatever threat comes its way. For more information about our solutions, don't hesitate to contact us at hello@group.co today.