No matter how secure your data, systems and networks are, hackers can still get into your company and gain access to your sensitive information. Organizations hire red team members to think and behave exactly like hackers, but with good intentions.
Red team members use a process to discover vulnerabilities and exploit them. This procedure is broken down into steps and red team members use different tools for each step. Let’s take a look at some of the most important tools that red team members use during each phase.
Reconnaissance: Reconnaissance, one of the most important steps in any red-team assessment, is a popular and highly valued step. This stage is where the red team gathers all information about the target network or system. These are the three most popular reconnaissance tools:
Nmap: Nmap, a widely used and highly effective tool for reconnaissance, is one of the most popular. It is a network scanner and has many useful features. The Red Team can learn a lot about any computer that can reach the network via Nmap. Network scanning must be used with care as it is easy to detect.
Censys: Censys allows you to gather data about all your assets to help you prevent target assaults. This application provides actionable data, assists in tracking assets’ changes and identifies possible weaknesses.
Shodan: Shodan can be described as a search engine for devices connected to the internet. IoT devices are widely used and have poor security. They can be a great entry point for a Red Team. Shodan can help you classify these devices.
Accessing the target’s information: After the red team has collected all relevant information, they can then exploit the vulnerabilities to gain access to the organization’s networks and systems. They must then maintain that access. Here are some tools to help red teams gain and keep access.
Ncat: Information security experts refer to NCAT as the Swiss Army knife for security. This program’s main function is to establish a connection to any port using TCP/UDP. It can scan port numbers, grab banners and grab data, as well as create remote shells.
SET: A Social Engineering Toolskit (SET) lets you create phishing attacks and assess your customers’ resistance to social engineering. This tool can be used to create phishing emails, websites, or malicious attachments.
Metasploit: Although Metasploit is a primarily commercial tool, the community edition of Metasploit is still very powerful. Metasploit Framework: With over 1,500 exploits built and the ability to integrate custom ones, it is the most popular exploitation framework in the world.
The Red Team can access the customer’s network to provide valuable information. Passive network reconnaissance is not enough. Active network reconnaissance can reveal the network infrastructure, services used by different machines, and user credentials if there are insecure protocols being used. These are the tools that can be used to analyze network traffic.
Aircrackng: Aircrackng is a tool that is included with Kali Linux. It is used to hack WiFi networks. This tool combines a packet scanner, a WEP/WPA2/WPA2 cracker and network analysis tool into one application. This tool can be used for hacking into wifi networks.
Wireshark: Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that captures packets from network connections such as those connecting to the internet or your home office. Data packets are the discrete units that make up an Ethernet network. Wireshark is the most widely used packet sniffer in all of history.
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![Report: AWS Performance Predictability Related to Internet Reliance ThousandEyes published cloud performance research which cites AWS’s dependence on the public Internet, rather than its own backbone network, as contributing to operational risks that can affect performance predictability. The San Franciso-based firm, which calls itself an Internet and cloud intelligence business, published its second annual Cloud Performance Benchmark this month. It compares global network performance as well as connectivity differences between five major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Azure), Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud. [Click on the image to see a larger view.] Cloud Connectivity falls into two camps. (source:ThousandEyes). The company stated in a press release that some cloud providers rely heavily upon the public Internet to transport traffic rather than their backbones. This can impact performance predictability. AWS and Alibaba Cloud, while Google Cloud and Azure heavily rely on their private backbone networks for transporting customer traffic, protecting it against performance variations associated with delivering over public Internet, rely heavily upon the public internet for most transport. This can lead to greater operational risk and impact on performance predictability. IBM uses a hybrid approach that is specific to each region. In a blog post, the company explained this finding and advised customers to pay attention. It stated that although the cloud providers tested generally had comparable performance in terms of bi-directional network latency and architecture, differences in connectivity can have an impact on traffic between users or certain cloud hosting regions. “For example, Azure and GCP use their backbones extensively to carry user-to-hosting-region traffic. AWS and Alibaba rely heavily on the Internet to transport user traffic, while IBM uses a hybrid approach. Exposure to the Internet increases uncertainty in performance, creates risk to cloud strategies, and raises operational complexity. Enterprises planning public cloud connectivity should consider the tolerance of their organization for the unpredictable nature. The report also questioned the AWS Global Accelerator, described by AWS as “a service that improves availability and performance of applications with local and global users.” AWS stated that it provides static IP addresses as a fixed entry point to AWS Regions application endpoints. ThousandEyes stated that “AWS Global Accelerator does not always outperform the Internet.” The Global Accelerator follows an optimized route through AWS’ densely connected backbone. However, performance improvements are not uniform across the globe. While the Global Accelerator is more performant than the Internet connectivity path in many cases, there are still instances of performance improvements that are negligible or worse than default AWS connectivity. Enterprises should evaluate the performance gains of the Global Accelerator before deciding on a strategy to maximize their ROI. ThousandEyes also listed other findings in the report:](https://wemakedesigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/picture-6-825x510.jpg)
