Red Team
Noun · Verb · Security & Infosec · Origin: 1960
Definitions
A group authorized to simulate real-world adversarial attacks against an organization's defenses, operating with the tactics, techniques, and procedures of actual threat actors to identify weaknesses that automated scans miss.
In plain English: A team of security experts who pretend to be hackers and try to break into a company, to find weak spots before real attackers do.
Etymology
- 1960s
- The U.S. military coins 'Red Team' during Cold War exercises where a group plays the Soviet adversary (red for communism)
- 1997
- The NSA forms its first Information Assurance Red Team, bringing the concept into cybersecurity
- 2010s
- Red teaming becomes standard corporate practice; companies hire attackers to test their own defenses
Related Terms
- Penetration Testing
- Honeypot
- Blue Team
- OSINT
- Pentest
- Nmap
- Fuzzing
- Canary Token
- Aircrack-ng
- Binary Exploitation
- Black Box Testing
- Content Disarm and Reconstruction
- CTF
- Ethical Hacking
- Exploit Chain
- Exploit Development
- Gray Box Testing
- Kernel Exploit
- Metasploit
- Nmap Scripting Engine
- Offensive Security
- Pass the Ticket
- Access Broker
- Address Resolution Protocol Attack
- ARP Cache Poisoning
- Confusion
- Gzip Bomb
- Memory Scraping
- MITM
- Penetration Test
- Responsible AI Security