The red team is nothing but an offensive side of security. Red Teamers think and act like real-world cyber attackers. The red team imitates the actual attacker’s techniques and methods to identify the weakness in the organization’s infrastructure and report them to the administration.
A red team is a group of white hat/Ethical hackers, or they are also called offensive security professionals who are hired to play the role of an actual attacker in the organization and show them their vulnerabilities so that the blue teams can find and fix the problems.
How red team uses tools in CyberSecurity:
The red team follows every step of a cyberattacker. The main feature of a red team is that they have to think out of the box and constantly find new techniques and tools to assess the organization’s security postures thoroughly.
The operations of a Red team must always run in a fast-paced environment. There are many tools to use during the cybersecurity lifecycle like exploitation framework, post scanner, intel gathering tool, and vulnerability scanning tools. One of the primary foundations of successfully being a red teamer is to use the right tools.
In this blog, let us discuss the Top 10 Tools you need as a Red Team Ethical Hacker.
1. Nikto: Nikto is an open-source software command-line vulnerability scanning tool that scans web servers for critical outdated server software, CGIs/Files, and various problems. Nikto runs severe and generic type particular checks. It also prints and captures if it receives any cookies.
2. SpiderFoot: SpiderFoot is a Reconnaissance tool that automatically queries over 100 public data sources to gather data on IP addresses, email addresses, names, domain names, and many more.
3. SQLmap tool: SQLlmap tool is a free tool used in penetration testing to identify and exploit SQL injection defects. SQLmap tool automates the procedure of identifying and exploiting SQL injections.
4. Metasploit: Metasploit is a potent tool that ethical hackers and cybercriminals use to examine vulnerabilities systematically on servers and networks. As it is an open-source framework, you can use it in any Operating System.
5. SET(Social Engineering Toolkit): SET is a toolkit that is used to perform Social Engineering Techniques online. This tool is used for many attack scenarios like website attack vectors and spear phishing.
6. Veil: Veil Framework is one of the most widespread antivirus deception tools available among the most worthy red team tools. Red teams can utilize it to create Metasploit payloads within Python and Ruby, amidst others, and to avoid many popular antivirus solutions.
7. Hashcat: Hashcat is the “world’s fastest password cracker.” It is an open-source password hash cracker that red teams can utilize for performing dictionary attacks and brute-forcing passwords between other services for vulnerable password decoding. Hashcat is an easy and great red team open-source tool to have within your arsenal.
8. BloodHound: BloodHound is a popularly accepted security tool for both red and blue teams. This tool is employed to reflect active directory environments, including users, and reveal access control lists and their connections. Being a tool for red teaming BloodHound assists in discovering various attack paths to the target and recognizing privilege connections when implementing domain escalations.
9. LaZagne: The LaZagne project is an open-source application to recover many passwords saved at a local computer. Every software saves its passwords utilizing different techniques like APIs, plaintext, databases, custom algorithms, etc.
10. Pupy: Pupy (yes, not “puppy”) is a cross-platform post-exploitation open-source, plus remote administration tool. Composed essentially in Python, this is another problematic tool to identify, presenting it as a fabulous addition to the red team toolkit. Red teams can build Windows payloads to execute non-interactive commands on multiple hosts and exploit Windows concurrently. You can also see the BeRoot and LaZagne tools as post-exploitation modules.
There are seven phases where the Red Teams use these tools, and the phases are:
Reconnaissance: When starting any security investigation, gathering the information or reconnaissance will be the first step to exploit the target and reach the objective. The only purpose of this phase is to gather all the information possible.
By executing reconnaissance, the red teams can understand the target network and find the vulnerabilities.
Weaponization: Weaponization is a procedure of creating tools for attacking a target. This is done by considering the information gathered from phase1 that is reconnaissance. Weaponization involves infecting the files and documents and creating malicious payloads.
Delivery and Exploitation: This phase, called the delivery phase, is really the origin of executing an attack: it includes getting a hold of the target network and yielding the target. In this phase, we can discover methods to dispatch the payload generated in the earlier phase to the target.
Privilege escalation: Once the target is compromised, and a foothold is gained, opponents move farther within the network. Within this phase, we can view various techniques. After poisoning the target systems, the payload will attempt to correlate with the significant parts of the system getting user privileges to obtain more unofficial data.
Lateral movement: Lateral movement means the method of transferring from one compromised host to another to obtain further sensitive data that is observed on other networks and systems of the target that was yet not relinquished. Both attackers and red teams utilize techniques to locate and control remote systems upon the target network.
Command and control: After the original compromise, the odds are that remote passage will be quickly eliminated from the target network. This is why, at this phase, endurance is the key. Command and control is a red team operations phase. Steps and procedures are conducted to accomplish persistent connection to the controlled systems within the target network, and remote access for data exfiltration is set.
Exfiltration and complete: This is the final phase where manipulations of the target system are done to accomplish the purpose of the operation. The final aim of a real-life cyber-attack and red team operations is to obtain a path and exfiltrate sensitive data from the target system.
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