6 Best Practices for a Successful Blue Team

In today's cybersecurity landscape, Red, Blue, and Purple teams each have their own responsibilities. Although each team has its unique perspective and mission, the Blue Team can be said to shoulder the most critical task: protecting the organisation from cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities.
To this end, the Blue Team must understand the organisation's business needs, relevant threats, digital footprint, and associated vulnerabilities. From there, the team can address the most pressing threats and vulnerabilities by implementing security controls and mitigation measures, thereby strengthening the organisation's security posture. Maril Vernon, Senior Security Engineer and Purple Team Lead at Aquia, Inc., stated:

The composition of the Blue Team goes far beyond SOC analysts and IT operations staff. Everyone from the Business Information Security Officer [BISO] to the Cyber Threat Intelligence [CTI] team, to enterprise risk and business continuity planning [BCP] professionals, is part of it. At the end of the day, even your Red Team is working for the Blue side.

We are all striving to proactively demonstrate and improve security. In Purple Team exercises, the most critical and important part of what we do is identifying and integrating members from various Blue Teams, and truly imparting adversarial objectives, mindsets, and tradecraft to them. The bottom line is that Blue Teams constitute the first, second, and third lines of defence at different levels, and we do not want to gamble on the capabilities of any of them. The middle of an incident is not the place to identify and remediate process and control gaps. We never want to show up in a fair fight with an adversary, and proper Blue Team maturity is how we give ourselves the upper hand.

Here are six best practices that Blue Teams can adopt:

▌01

Use Cybersecurity Frameworks

Without building a framework, it is difficult to develop and implement a coherent cybersecurity plan. There is no shortage of cybersecurity frameworks, such as: domestic frameworks based on the Cybersecurity Law like MLPS 2.0, Data Security Law, industry standards, ISO 27001, and others. These frameworks all provide guidelines for mitigating cybersecurity threats within an organisation. They span the essential activities of identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. Organisations will go through these phases multiple times as risks and threats emerge.

▌02

Understand the Assets to Be Protected

Without proper visibility and identification of the assets it must protect, no cybersecurity plan can be effective. This is why control over hardware and software asset inventories, among others, has been the cornerstone of CIS Critical Security Controls for years. A fundamental truth of cybersecurity is that you cannot protect what you cannot see or do not know exists. In today's cloud-driven environment, traditional assets are increasingly software-defined and reside within the environment of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). This also applies to endpoints, as the use of virtual desktops continues to grow. Visibility applies to all organisational assets, whether physical or virtual.

▌03

Prune and Rationalise the Product Portfolio

Today's Blue Team professionals are dealing with a myriad of tools, platforms, and resources to cover the environments they must monitor and protect. This means a dizzying array of alerts and notifications that distract them, drain their cognitive capacity, and can even impact their morale. To maximise the value of the Blue Team, one essential action is to minimise the number of false positives, duplicate alerts, and non-value-adding notifications. One way to achieve this is by rationalising the tool portfolio to eliminate redundancy and ensure the team receives and responds to high-fidelity data.

▌04

Select Tools That the Team Can Master and Use Effectively

Cybersecurity leaders may feel compelled to procure and implement countless tools to address relevant threats and risks, and understandably so, as there is much to defend against. Research shows that despite the rapid growth in security tools, relevant metrics indicate these tools are not yielding the expected impact. For example, Ponemon reports that organisations have an average of over 40 security tools, with team members admitting they do not know how well they work. A study by Market Cube pointed out that teams are adding tools faster than they can use them effectively. Ironically, the burden of tool maintenance is harming threat response and ultimately the security posture. The introduction of each tool increases the team's overall cognitive load. Learning the tool, provisioning and configuring it, and then monitoring it for actionable use of its telemetry all take time. Burnout and cognitive overload in cybersecurity are real issues, not only because they drain the team's energy and morale, but because using too many tools means less time to optimise security defences and reduce organisational risk. Therefore, stacking tools usually does not reduce threats and vulnerabilities, but rather exacerbates risk exposure. These tools themselves also represent a portion of the organisation's attack surface and often possess privileges that can be exploited by attackers.

▌05

Think from the Adversary's Perspective

For defence professionals, a common analogy repeated in the cybersecurity industry is to "think like an attacker." This is intuitive, because to stop malicious activity, one must understand how the enemy thinks. The best way to do this is to put yourself in their shoes. That is to say, there is value in the Blue Team spending some time practising from an offensive standpoint. Understanding the relevant tools, tactics, and procedures used by attackers can go a long way in helping the Blue Team carry out their defensive activities. Some say this helps to better connect with attackers by gaining some hands-on offensive security experience. This does not have to be a formal role change or targeting a real system, but can be facilitated through labs or participating in Capture the Flag (CtF) exercises.

▌06

Fight as You Train

The late US General George S. Patton once said, "You fight like you train." What he meant is that when it is time to fight, you will perform the way you have trained. Under pressure, organisations and individuals do not just miraculously rise to the occasion; they sink to their level of training. This emphasises why regular and rigorous training is so important—not just tabletop exercises and paper-based drills, but real Red Team exercises and experiences. This is a mature approach that forces organisations not only to speculate on their readiness to detect incidents, defend against attackers, and ultimately withstand attacks, but also to actually prove it. Combat training will better empower your team and organisation to handle the real-world threats they face. Seclutions always stands from the organisation's perspective, helping clients discover the root problems existing in their defensive systems, such as product redundancy and lack of team experience. Through security validation technology, Seclutions approaches from the attacker's perspective, recreating real attack scenarios to help organisations validate whether their security products and tools are functioning as claimed and are properly configured. This allows organisations to develop a clear understanding of the capabilities and structure of their defensive systems, enabling personnel at different levels and roles to grasp the security defence status from their respective angles, achieving the goal of "knowing the enemy and knowing oneself." On this basis, the Blue Team can precisely identify the weaknesses in the defence system, target their efforts, and take measures to mitigate risks. | Reference Source:
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3670132/6-best-practices-for-blue-team-success.html