Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies: A practical guide to building a penetration testing program having homefield advantage

Develop your red team skills by learning essential foundational tactics, techniques, and procedures, and boost the overall security posture of your organization by leveraging the homefield advantage

Key Features

• Build, manage, and measure an offensive red team program
• Leverage the homefield advantage to stay ahead of your adversaries
• Understand core adversarial tactics and techniques, and protect pentesters and pentesting assets

Book Description

It's now more important than ever for organizations to be ready to detect and respond to security events and breaches. Preventive measures alone are not enough for dealing with adversaries. A well-rounded prevention, detection, and response program is required. This book will guide you through the stages of building a red team program, including strategies and homefield advantage opportunities to boost security.

The book starts by guiding you through establishing, managing, and measuring a red team program, including effective ways for sharing results and findings to raise awareness. Gradually, you'll learn about progressive operations such as cryptocurrency mining, focused privacy testing, targeting telemetry, and even blue team tooling. Later, you'll discover knowledge graphs and how to build them, then become well-versed with basic to advanced techniques related to hunting for credentials, and learn to automate Microsoft Office and browsers to your advantage. Finally, you'll get to grips with protecting assets using decoys, auditing, and alerting with examples for major operating systems.

By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build, manage, and measure a red team program effectively and be well-versed with the fundamental operational techniques required to enhance your existing skills.

What you will learn

• Understand the risks associated with security breaches
• Implement strategies for building an effective penetration testing team
• Map out the homefield using knowledge graphs
• Hunt credentials using indexing and other practical techniques
• Gain blue team tooling insights to enhance your red team skills
• Communicate results and influence decision makers with appropriate data

Who this book is for

This is one of the few detailed cybersecurity books for penetration testers, cybersecurity analysts, security leaders and strategists, as well as red team members and chief information security officers (CISOs) looking to secure their organizations from adversaries. The program management part of this book will also be useful for beginners in the cybersecurity domain. To get the most out of this book, some penetration testing experience, and software engineering and debugging skills are necessary.

Table of Contents

1. Establishing an Offensive Security Program
2. Managing an Offensive Security Team
3. Measuring an Offensive Security Program
4. Progressive Red Team Operations
5. Situational Awareness - Mapping Out the Homefield Using Graph Databases
6. Building a Comprehensive Knowledge Graph
7. Hunting for Credentials
8. Advanced Credential Hunting
9. Powerful Automation
10. Protecting the Pen Tester
11. Traps, Deceptions, and Honeypots
12. Blue Team Tactics for the Red Team

Johann Rehberger has over fifteen years of experience in threat analysis, threat modeling, risk management, penetration testing, and red teaming. As part of his many years at Microsoft, Johann established a penetration test team in Azure Data and led the program as Principal Security Engineering Manager. Recently, he built out a red team at Uber and currently works as an independent security and software engineer. Johann is well versed in analysis, design, implementation, and testing of software systems. Additionally, he enjoys providing training and was an instructor for ethical hacking at the University of Washington. Johann contributed to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and holds a master's in computer security from the University of Liverpool.