Thinking like an attacker

In today's threat environment, it's more important than ever to have a well-trained and effective blue team that can confidently respond to threats. Red teams, or people who emulate attackers, are essential in identifying vulnerabilities and gaps in an organization's defenses. However, developing the skills necessary to be a successful “redteamer” is difficult and time-consuming.

The Atomic Red Team (ART) is a collection of automated attacks that can help security professionals learn the tools and techniques needed to be successful red teamers. In this blog post, we'll explore how ART can be used to train and improve the effectiveness of your red team.

What is Atomic Red Team (ART)?

Atomic Red Team (ART) provides security teams with a valuable tool for testing and improving their detection capabilities. ART is an automated collection of Attacker Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) developed to simulate threats from an adversarial perspective. With ART, security teams can better understand the behavior they should be looking for in order to detect attacks. Furthermore, utilizing ART gives teams a chance to continuously learn by creating new detections when results aren't as expected. Overall, it helps create resilient organizations with a more sophisticated security posture.

Where did Atomic Red Team come from?

Red Canary is a provider of cyber security services and products. Founded in 2012, Red Canary provides organizations with the intelligence and insights needed to detect, investigate, and respond to threats quickly and effectively. While I am certain Red Canary does great things with its paid products, I am most familiar with its open-source project (Atomic Red Team).

Atomic Red Team (ART) is a comprehensive collection of attack simulations developed by Red Canary. It is designed to help security teams better understand the behavior they should be looking for in order to detect attacks. ART can be found on GitHub.

Why is it called Atomic Red Team?

Atomic Red Team (ART) was named after the concept of Atomic testing. This term originated in 1945 when the United States used the atomic bomb to end World War II. Similarly, the Atomic Red Team is designed to simulate "atomic" attacks that can cause significant damage to an organization's security posture.

How can ART be used to develop detections or learn about attacker TTPs?

ART provides an automated collection of attacks that can be used to gain valuable knowledge on attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) from an adversarial perspective. Attacker TTPs are hard to pinpoint, so ART can offer a reliable way to learn more about the ways malicious actors interact with their environment. Security practitioners can use ART directly or as a basis for custom scenarios to detect and mitigate security risks.

How can using ART help build better defenses?

By using Atomic Red Team, organizations can help improve their defenses through well-defined attack scenarios that identify and highlight areas of improvement for existing security controls. ART enables the development of increased detection capabilities to enhance the security posture and increase the ability to mitigate future attacks. In addition, it empowers teams to learn more effective ways to respond quickly with appropriate countermeasures during a breach or other malicious activity detected within their network. Ultimately, ART allows an in-depth understanding of potential threats and provides better defenses against them.

Why is the attacker perspective important when working on a blue team?

When it comes to maintaining proper cybersecurity measures, having an understanding of the attacker's perspective is absolutely essential for blue teams. This is because, without full insight into how an attack could be launched or what abilities attackers possess, defensive efforts can fall short. By moving away from merely reactively responding to attacks and actively seeking to anticipate them, blue teams can benefit from using frameworks that are inspired by Red Team activities and guides like Atomic Red Team (ART). Such activities are invaluable in giving a comprehensive view of the offensive side of security and thereby arming blue teams with the skills they need to stay one step ahead of potential attackers.

How to get started using ART?

Taking the first steps to incorporate the Atomic Red Team (ART) into your security testing can be a daunting task. However, the benefits that ART provides, such as an automated collection of security penetration tests, make it worth all the effort. To get started with ART, it's important to have a basic understanding of what type of attacking techniques will be used and how they may interact with your system. It's also critical to becoming familiar with any relevant tools and scripts that are included in the kit and to think about how you plan to use them in your testing environment.

As red team activities require difficult-to-develop skills that are hard to find, tools like ART enable organizations to get started easily and quickly. Automated collections of attacks, such as Atomic Red Team, provide great value across many areas, from detection development to education and learning.