Red Team Automation: Boost Efficiency and Focus on High-Value Tasks

As cybersecurity threats grow more sophisticated, red teams are under increasing pressure to keep pace while dealing with intense workloads, limited resources, and repetitive tasks. Red team automation is emerging as a game-changer, transforming operational efficiency by handling routine processes, freeing up time for red teams to focus on the high-stakes, complex engagements that strengthen an organization’s defense.

With automation, red teams can run continuous assessments, create customized attack scenarios, and shift their efforts from tedious manual work to impactful security insights, enhancing the overall security posture.

Key Red Team Challenges 

Red teams face unique pressures that limit their effectiveness and consume valuable resources. Persistent challenges like workforce shortages and budget constraints only add to the complexity, but a red team’s core responsibilities introduce additional obstacles.

1. Repetitive Tasks 

The red team’s responsibilities are time-consuming and labor-intensive, which leaves them less time for high-value tasks if they don’t automate the simple stuff. Internal red teams need to keep up with the latest indicators of compromise (IoCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) by coding new attack simulations every day.

These new simulations are difficult to develop and not easily incorporated without heavy coding and QA skills. Additionally, following each assessment, they may need to write up their results for two different audiences – technical results for the blue team, so they know what they need to remediate, and executive results for the leadership team so they understand how their security gaps impact the business. 

Frameworks like The Pyramid of Pain can help red teams prioritize their focus. The Pyramid of Pain categorizes IoCs based on how difficult they are for attackers to alter, from hashes and IP addresses at the bottom to TTPs at the top. By concentrating on higher-level IoCs like TTPs, red teams can focus on meaningful threat emulation that disrupts adversaries’ operations, rather than spending excessive time coding simulations for easily changed IoCs.

However, this prioritization doesn’t address the sheer volume of IoCs that red teams must process or the repetitive nature of their tasks. This is where automation becomes indispensable, enabling red teams to scale their operations, automate lower-level IoC assessments, and dedicate their time to strategic, high-value activities.

2. Limited by Scope and Resources 

Attackers are unlimited in time and resources when they try and infiltrate an organization; they will do anything to gain an initial foothold and reach the crown jewels. Pen testers do their best to emulate an attacker, but they are limited by the scope of the engagement and minimizing the impact on the availability of systems. Attackers don’t care about knocking over that business-critical server if it gets them to their ultimate goal.

Offensive security posture assessments often cannot mimic attacker techniques in breadth and depth. For example, they may be unable to test all the different steps of the entire kill-chain due to client restrictions, or they do not have opportunistic capabilities when they reach a dead end to try and find other ways in. As mentioned above, new IoCs and TTPs come out daily, and it can be difficult to keep up and create proof of concept exploits to test for these weaknesses while in an engagement. 

3. The Short Shelf-Life of Testing Results

To make sure your organization is protected, your red team needs to run assessments on a continual basis. Your annual pen test reports give you a point-in-time snapshot of your security, but cybersecurity is fast-moving.  Dynamic IT environments and the continuously changing threat landscape lead to security drift; things change so quickly that if you aren’t testing repeatedly, you won’t know if you are actually protected against any new (or old) threat. Manually running these assessments is labor-intensive and time-consuming. 

How Automated Red Teaming Tools Address These Challenges

Red team automation tools provide a platform to increase red teams’ operational efficiency and optimize their adversarial activities in a production-safe environment. Red team automation enables red teams to: 

1. Automate, Scale, and Customize  Red Team Activities

Red team automation platforms reduce manual labor for red teamers by automating assessment scripts, repetitive tasks, and reporting in a centralized location. Red teamers can simply choose which out-of-the-box assessments they want to run based on their expertise, or easily create new templates which are made available to the entire team.

This capability enables teams with junior members who are still learning on the job to scale and run hundreds of attacks at the level of their most seasoned team members. Think of trying to hike a new trail having a map to guide you versus just stumbling through on your own.

2. Continuous Assessments to Reduce Security Drift

Red teams also have the option to continuously run their assessments on a scheduled cadence – daily, weekly, or monthly – to prevent drift and lower risk. Following each assessment, technical and executive reports with easy-to-digest remediation guidance are automatically created based on the data generated during the assessment, relieving red teams of that responsibility. 

The assessment templates also promote continuous improvement and purple team capabilities which should be used to increase collaboration with blue teams. Training blue teamers to recognize the behaviors and signatures of an attacker through simulated assessments run by the red teamers is kind of like practicing before the big game.  

Additionally, these platforms update their assessments 24/7 based on newly discovered threats so that red teamers with limited resources can hit the ground running sooner. Production-safe assessments are available for testing quickly after a new threat is discovered.   

3. Customizable Complex Scenarios

Red team automation platforms enable red teams to create complex customized scenarios from pre-built resources and custom binaries and executions, without any limits or restrictions. Each step in the scenario is connected, so a previous assessment output can be used as part of the upcoming assessment input.

Custom scenarios can be used for pro-active threat hunting and health checks. It is also an effective way for blue teams to continuously test mitigation efforts following a pen test; by automating pen test assessments to see if the blue team’s remediation reduced risk, red teams don’t need to spend their time manually running the same assessments.

Once an assessment is run and blue teamers receive remediation guidance, they can re-run the same assessment as often as they want, independent of the red team, to see if their mitigation efforts are effective. Additionally, the framework launches attacks and correlates them to security control findings through API integrations to provide actionable detection and mitigation guidance for security analysts. 

Additional Features in a Red Team Automation Platform 

It’s important to note that when choosing a red team automation platform, you may want to make sure it includes these additional helpful capabilities: 

1. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) 

The reconnaissance phase entails a comprehensive analysis of an organization, which can mean days or weeks before red teamers even begin an attack, depending on the scope of the engagement. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) technology emulates real attackers to continuously discover and enumerate externally accessible digital assets (such as domains and IP addresses). Taking it a step further to give important business context, EASM can identify vulnerabilities and exploit them to truly map out the organization’s external attack surface. 

2. Phishing Awareness 

Testing phishing awareness is an important aspect of assessing an organization’s security posture but manually running phishing campaigns is labor intensive and time-consuming. Pen testing often doesn’t include social engineering in scope, but a large percentage of the hacks you read about on the news start with a phish. The Phishing Awareness capability provides the resources to create an automated internal phishing campaign. 

3. Lateral Movement 

Continuously assessing network configuration and segmentation policies through escalating privileges and exploiting misconfigurations on multiple machines can be time-consuming for red teams when done manually. The Lateral Movement capability emulates a real-life hacker that has gained an initial foothold in a company’s network and shows how the hacker can move laterally from the originating workstation in search of valuable assets. It runs automatically and applies “living off the land” non-destructive hacking tactics and techniques to continuously uncover infrastructure misconfigurations and weaknesses. This allows you to verify your environments are properly isolated with evidence.  

4. Full Kill-Chain Campaign 

The Full Kill-Chain APT (advanced persistent threat) feature enables organizations to test security effectiveness across the entire cyber kill-chain. Red teams can run a full-scale APT attack simulation to understand the overall effectiveness of their security control configuration and detect and response tools.  

Cymulate Automated Red Teaming

Cymulate provides red teams a platform to increase their operational efficiency and optimize their adversarial activities in a production-safe environment. Cymulate’s red team capabilities include the modules Attack Surface Management (ASM), Phishing Awareness, Lateral Movement, Full-Kill Chain
Campaign, and Advanced Scenarios

Key Takeaways

Implementing an automated red teaming tool not only enhances productivity but boosts red team morale by reducing manual, time-consuming tasks. With automation, your red team can focus on high-impact, complex engagements, ultimately strengthening your organization’s security posture.

Ready to take your red team’s efficiency to the next level? Book a demo to see how Cymulate​ Continuous
Automated Red Teaming can strengthen your organization’s security posture with a hands-on approach.