Professional Red Teaming: Conducting Successful Cybersecurity Engagements

Use this unique book to leverage technology when conducting offensive security engagements. You will understand practical tradecraft, operational guidelines, and offensive security best practices as carrying out professional cybersecurity engagements is more than exploiting computers, executing scripts, or utilizing tools.

Professional Red Teaming introduces you to foundational offensive security concepts. The importance of assessments and ethical hacking is highlighted, and automated assessment technologies are addressed. The state of modern offensive security is discussed in terms of the unique challenges present in professional red teaming.

Best practices and operational tradecraft are covered so you feel comfortable in the shaping and carrying out of red team engagements. Anecdotes from actual operations and example scenarios illustrate key concepts and cement a practical understanding of the red team process.

You also are introduced to counter advanced persistent threat red teaming (CAPTR teaming). This is a reverse red teaming methodology aimed at specifically addressing the challenges faced from advanced persistent threats (APTs) by the organizations they target and the offensive security professionals trying to mitigate them.

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the challenges faced by offensive security assessments
• Incorporate or conduct red teaming to better mitigate cyber threats
• Initiate a successful engagement
• Get introduced to counter-APT red teaming (CAPTR)
• Evaluate offensive security processes

Who This Book Is For

Offensive security assessors and those who want a working knowledge of the process, its challenges, and its benefits. Current professionals will gain tradecraft and operational insight and non-technical readers will gain a high-level perspective of what it means to provide and be a customer of red team assessments.

About the Author

Jacob G. Oakley spent over seven years in the US Marines and was one of the founding members of the operational arm of the Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command at NSA, Ft. Meade. He left that unit as the senior Marine Corps operator and a division technical lead. After his enlistment he wrote and taught an advanced computer operations course, eventually returning back to mission support at Ft. Meade. He later left government contracting to do threat emulation and red teaming at a private company for commercial clients, serving as principal penetration tester and director of penetration testing and cyber operations. He is currently working as a cyber SME for a government customer. He completed his doctorate in IT at Towson University, researching and developing offensive cybersecurity methods and is the technical reviewer of the book Cyber Operations, second edition, by Mike O’Leary.