While talking about cyber security with customers or prospects and specifically more about security testing, we come across a more colorful world. cybersecurity tech is hardly associated with being colorful. Blue teams, red teams, yellow teams, and so on. Moving forward in this article we will discuss a handful of colors that have relevance in the field of security testing.
The World Economic Forum published an article on why 2020 is a turning point for cybersecurity, focusing on the need for business leaders to adopt a strong cybersecurity culture. The article also highlighted how the emergence of new technologies will create risks as the new decade starts. The Cybersecurity Color Wheel was presented by April C. Wright at BlackHat USA 2017 in light of the growing problem of cyber threats. She wrote a paper on the coloration wheel to increase and shed light on the completely different fields in cybersecurity. In the beginning, the sole groups identified in cybersecurity had been the pink and blue groups. But the safety discipline has extended past these groups. The present discussion focuses on manual security testing. Automated cyber-threat assessment is a purely different subject since there are no different teams involved and the security professionals who use the automated and simulated attacks are usually coordinating or sharing their respective vantage points.
The cybersecurity color wheel is mostly a multicolored circle that displays the various fields in cybersecurity. It is made up of primary colors, secondary colors, and white. The primary colors contain red, blue, and yellow; the secondary colors are a combination of those primary colors, and they display purple, orange, and green. In total, the cybersecurity color wheel represents seven colors. These colors each symbolize something simple but highly sensible and represent a team in cybersecurity. They all have their different functions and career paths which are elaborated on in the discussions below.
The red, blue, and yellow teams are the major and largest teams in a security department.
The red team is the offensive team in cybersecurity. Red represents "The Breakers." and they are the team commissioned to perform "ethical hacking" on an organization. They perform multiple security tests to do whatever it takes to breach the security defenses. They do more than just penetration testing to discover potential vulnerabilities and risks. The team acts like real-world attackers and carries out simulated cyber-threat to find and enumerate vulnerabilities in an organization's system before any real hackers find them. Then these vulnerabilities are sent to the defense team to correct the required.
The term Blue is entirely different from Red. They are the defensive team. Their responsibilities are to defend and protect the organization's assets from unauthorized access and cyber-attacks. They are responsible for implementing defensive security, damage control, and incident response. They may also play the role of threat hunters, operational security wardens, and data forensics experts. A blue team is made up of Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts, incident responders risk assessment analysts, and more.
Yellow stands for "The Builders." The team is responsible for developing the security system of an organization. They could be an in-house IT department or a third-party security solutions provider. They may also be app or software developers, who are expected to ascertain that their applications are adequately secure.
Two primary colors are assembled to create a secondary color. The green, orange, and red teams are derived from the combination of two of the three primary colors.
Green, symbolizes the color between yellow and blue and symbolizes a change in mindset on the part of The Builder (the yellow team). This indicates that the creators of the security system put themselves in the shoes of The Defender.
The orange team comes from the need to bridge the gap between the red and the yellow team. Their main responsibilities are education and facilitating interaction between the red team and the professionals building the application system.
Purple being the color between red and blue represents a change in mindset from being a pure defender to a team that also takes the vantage point of the cyber-attacks.
The white team is the neutral team. They are answerable for management, compliance, and policy-making. They operate the security departments, monitor their progress and metrics, organize teams and their exercises, and report the results to the organization's board if there is one. This team includes Security Managers, Chief Information Security Officers, Security Auditors, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) analysts, and more.
An organization's security posture means its ability to respond to and prevent cyberattacks. Cybersecurity is not a one-team job, but rather a very large and important field. Blending these colors represents the sharing of perspectives and collaboration similarly imparts a useful lesson system builders, defenders, and attackers should consider.
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