Mature organisations attending the Cyber Secure Forum in both the public and private sectors are increasingly turning to red teaming and blue teaming (simulated attack and defence exercises) to rigorously test their cyber resilience.
Red team exercises mimic real-world attackers. These ethical hackers use the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) as cybercriminals, e.g. phishing, privilege escalation, lateral movement, exfiltration, to attempt to breach an organisation’s defences. The objective isn’t just to find technical vulnerabilities, but to test how well people, processes, and systems respond under pressure.
In contrast, the blue team is made up of internal defenders, security operations centre (SOC) analysts, IT teams, and incident responders, are tasked with detecting, responding to, and mitigating the simulated attack in real time.
The true value of red vs. blue lies in insight and collaboration. These exercises help identify blind spots not typically uncovered through conventional pen testing. For example, how quickly can the SOC detect a breach? Are alert escalations working? Do teams know their roles during a ransomware event? The focus shifts from patching a single vulnerability to improving an organisation’s overall threat posture.
Many organisations are now running purple team exercises, which combine both red and blue teams in a more collaborative format. The red team shares its methods and insights during or immediately after the engagement, enabling the blue team to improve detection and response techniques in near real-time.
Public sector organisations, particularly those involved in critical national infrastructure (CNI), have embraced this approach to meet the growing need for realistic, high-stakes resilience testing. Similarly, financial services firms and healthcare providers, prime targets for ransomware and nation-state actors as we see in the news, are using red teaming to validate their incident response playbooks and ensure compliance with frameworks like NIS2 and ISO 27001.
Ultimately, red and blue teaming provides something traditional penetration tests often cannot: a dynamic, adversarial lens through which organisations can stress-test their assumptions and mature their security programmes. In an era where breaches are a matter of when, not if, simulated attacks could be your most valuable form of preparation.
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