This video is sponsored by TriHackMe, the world's largest cybersecurity learning platform that offers beginner-friendly and gamified cybersecurity education. Learn more about TriHackMe in just a few moments. Red teaming, the job where you pretend to be the villain while hoping nobody mistakes you for the real one. It's all about breaking into anything and everything, finding vulnerabilities, exploiting them, and giving the blue team heart palpitations.
All in the name of making security better. Let's dive into the technical- chaos, unrealistic expectations, and existential crisis of being a red teamer. Red teaming isn't just about hacking, contrary to what everybody thinks.
It's about simulating sophisticated adversaries, while getting three weeks to do what an APT group spends six months planning. And the budget? Let's just say your state-sponsored adversary emulation might involve a Raspberry Pi, a Flipper Zero, and duct tape.
Reconnaissance. Before you even think about trying to break into anything, there's recon. Open source intelligence, passive network scans, and scouring employee social media for clues.
You're basically a digital detective. Except instead of solving crimes, you're planning legal ones. Pro tip.
Trello boards named passwords. Goldmine. Adversary emulation. You're tasked with mimicking real world... threat actors.
Fancy terms like TTPs get thrown around a lot, but in reality, you're balancing between let's be realistic and let's not destroy the production environment. And when you do pull off something slick, management says, no one's actually going to do that. No one, Sharon. Really? No one?
In theory, you're simulating a real attack. In practice, you're fighting for admin rights on a test environment where Jenkins is already broken because someone forgot to renew the SSL certificate. Penetration testing.
Let's clear something up. Penetration testing? and red teaming are not the same. Despite what Sharon and management might think, pen testers look for vulnerabilities in networks, apps, and devices.
They're the locksmiths of cybersecurity, checking if your doors are locked, occasionally finding one propped open by Carl because it's easier this way. Red teaming? Whole different beast. It's adversary emulation, thinking and acting like an actual threat actor.
You're not just checking the locks, you're figuring out how to get Carl to hand you the keys because you pretended to be his old college roommate. And please, stop asking red teamers if they just run Nessus and call it a day. That's like asking Michelin star chefs if they just microwave frozen dinners. They do, but don't ask.
Pen testing is where you politely ask a company, may I hack you? Then proceed to bypass WAFs, exploit misconfigured S3 buckets, and find plain text credentials stored in Jenkins. The real enemy? Scope creep. Can you just test this one extra little thing?
No, Bob. That's a whole new engagement. Vulnerability research. Ah, CVEs. Finding zero days is the dream, until you realize you'll spend months reverse engineering firmware, only to discover the vendor doesn't care.
We don't support security patches, they say. Fantastic. Bug bounty program?
Non-existent. Exploit development. Writing custom payloads to bypass EDR. Sounds glamorous until you spend 12 hours debugging shellcode that won't pop a calc. And when you do succeed?
Management wonders, why didn't you just use Metasploit? Because that's not the point, Steve. C2 frameworks?
Command and control frameworks like Cobalt Strike, Mythic, and Sliver are your lifelines. But Blue Team knows them inside and out. So now you're rolling your own, hoping to evade the behavior analytics, while praying your homemade framework doesn't crash mid-demo.
Nothing says professional quite like debugging your own malware. Social engineering. Phishing campaigns, phishing calls, and pretexting. You're basically acting like a con artist, but without the money.
And no matter how many clever phishing emails you craft, someone will inevitably say, Our users are too smart for that. Spoiler, they're not. Carl clicked free cruise giveaway while on board a cruise.
Physical red teaming. Breaking into buildings James Bond style sounds cool until you're crawling through HVAC ducts. Tighter than your jeans these days. Only to trigger an alarm because access denied wasn't just a metaphor. And when alarms inevitably go off, you get to practice the art of GTFO.
Or face trying to explain to the cops what a get out of jail free card is and that yours is in fact real. Pro tip. Always carry a convincing cover story just in case.
And a clipboard. I am the new IT guy, works wonders, and a confident clipboard can get you out of a lot of trouble. Lateral movement.
Pivoting across networks using SMB shares, misconfigured AD trusts, and stolen Kerberos tickets. Meanwhile, management's idea of security? Disabling clipboard sharing on RDP.
Privilege escalation. Finding ways to go from user to system. You exploit weak folder permissions, abuse token impersonation, and use...
Good ol' DLL hijacking. And when you succeed? That's just theoretical, says someone who clearly doesn't know how Windows works.
And when you fail? Your perfectly crafted payload? Blocked by Windows Defender.
Defense evasion. You're constantly dodging AV, EDR, and UEBA. Obfuscating PowerShell commands, encrypting payloads, and using lol bins become second nature.
And still you hear? Why didn't we catch this sooner? Because your logging is a dumpster fire, Gary. The grand finale! Getting data out without detection.
DNS tunneling, encrypted HTTPS traffic, and steganography are your friends. But when you explain how easy it was, management goes, our data is invaluable. Oh really?
Then why do you have a SOC? The bane of every red teamer's existence. You spend weeks crafting elegant exploits only to be reduced to writing Enable MFA.
And if the report isn't pretty enough? Can you add more graphics? Sure thing, Sharon.
Let me make a bar graph of your incompetence. Purple teaming. Collaborating with the blue team to improve defenses sounds great in theory. In practice, it's you explaining for the 17th time why disabling PowerShell isn't a long-term solution.
Tool fatigue? From Bloodhound and Sharphound to Responder and Crackmap Exec, the sheer number of tools is overwhelming. And sadly, the list never ends. And just when you master one, a new... must have tool drops on GitHub.
Welcome to the eternal hamster wheel. Speaking of constantly learning, today's sponsor, TriHackMe, can help with that. If you're looking to brush up on red teaming concepts or tools, TriHackMe offers red teaming education with dedicated modules to individual security tools. Whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned vet, TriHackMe can help you brush up your skills and do so in a fun... gamified way.
And if you're looking to see what blue teaming is up to, they can help with that too. So check out TriHackMe if you're looking to brush up on your cybersecurity skills. Threat intelligence.
Reading endless threat reports filled with buzzword acronyms like IOCs and TTPs. Half the time you're thinking, we already knew this. The other half, they're f***ed. Burnout.
Red teaming is mentally exhausting. You're constantly switching between offensive creativity and defense documentation. And when you finally take a break, your manager says, We need you for an urgent engagement!
Of course you do. Salary. Let's talk money.
Because at the end of the day, even cyber ninjas have rent to pay. Because no one's buying a house in this economy. Red teaming can pay well, but here's the twist.
Not always as well as other cybersecurity roles. Those GRC folks who write policies nobody reads? Yeah, they're cashing bigger checks while you're debugging C2 frameworks at 3am.
Meanwhile, threat hunters and SOC analysts get paid to monitor your chaos. And cloud security architects? They're buying Lamborghinis while you're explaining to your point of contact why you had to break into the CEO's office as part of the engagement. The red team glamour myth.
Red teaming is glamorized like it's the rock star of cybersecurity. Everyone thinks it's all Hollywood hacker montages and high stakes espionage. The truth? Most of the time, you're writing reports. looking up how to bypass EDR solutions, and wondering if that one failed payload is going to haunt you in your sleep.
And yes, it's cool, but it's not all smoke, neon lights, and furious keyboard typing. Sometimes it's just awkwardly sitting in a conference room explaining to management why storing passwords in plain text is a bad idea for the third time this year. Red teaming is a wild ride of technical brilliance, frustration, and caffeine-fueled madness.
You break into systems, get blamed for proving they were vulnerable, and somehow still love every chaotic minute of it. And remember, the real adversary isn't the threat actor, it's Carl in accounting.