Defense by offense: simulating attacks to promote strong organizational security policies

• Autor(a) principal: Caseiro, Bruno Jorge Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/34993
• topic: Red team; Penetration testing; Social engineering; Physical hacking; Physical pentesting; TIBER-EU

Cyber crime is continuously growing in current times due to the constant digitization of everyday activities. Recently, after the world was hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, this effect was even more noticeable. With more digital activity, cyber crime has a tendency to also increase. The simulation of adversaries as a testing tool is one of the most important instruments when evaluating an organization’s security. Penetration tests are not enough, as attackers resort to many other methods such as social engineering and its techniques (phishing, impersonation, tailgating, etc.). By simulating a full scale attack with minimal restrictions, "red teaming" is introduced. There was an attempt to perform a red team assessment to the University of Aveiro in order to evaluate, test and improve the security policies of the organization. However, due to legal and bureaucratic restrictions related mostly to data protection policies and other privacy measures, the plan was cut short to merely the planning of the red team. The TIBER-EU Framework was also introduced, representing the state of the art guidelines to red teaming in Europe. This framework was followed during the planning of the assessment, which allowed me, the author of this thesis and also the emulated red team, to find a couple of flaws in the University’s security by executing brief threat intelligence analysis sessions.