Red Team

A military term that refers to a team of experts who focus on penetration testing, assessment, and the design of secure systems. The name actually comes from the game “Capture the Flag,” in which a Blue Team tries to guard the flag—but in this case, the “flag” is sensitive data or a sensitive computer system. The referees are known as the White Team.

The annual Cyber Defense Exercise competition was held on May 12, 2005, and the winning team was the U.S. Naval Academy. The competition is meant to assist the participants to better protect the U.S. critical information systems and is sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). Each team designs, builds and configures a computer network simulating a deployed joint-service command. The network operations “Red Team” (consisting of NSA and Defense employees) takes four days to identify the vulnerabilities and then crack into each network. The winning team is found to be superior in its ability to detect, respond to, and recover from the network exploits.

See Also: Exploit; Vulnerabilities of Computers.