Highground Cyber's Virtual Red Team

Closing the Cyber Talent Gap for the SMB

Red Teams

Red Teams are defined as the individuals with information security-related knowledge, skills, and abilities who collaborate with the Blue Team by providing guidance on how to implement, operationalize, and maintain aspects of an organization’s Cybersecurity & Privacy Program. Therefore, these knowledge, skills, and abilities need to cover a diverse range of topics, such as Governance, Risk Management, Compliance Management, and Information Technology, just to name a few. Furthermore, these individuals typically assume a ‘white hat’ perspective, testing the information security capabilities of an organization for potentially exploitable weaknesses. This is an important information security concept, as Blue Teams, the group responsible for implementing information security controls, cannot be the group who determines the effectiveness of those controls, owing to potential conflicts of interest. Said differently, the Blue Team cannot be allowed to grade its own homework and the Red Team is responsible for ensuring that they don’t.

The Virtual Red Team & Cyber Talent Gap

Industry research has found that 73% of small and midmarket businesses have very limited and/or no access to information security professionals (e.g., experienced chief information security officers or reputable security analysts), a phenomenon that Highground Cyber refers to as the ‘Cyber Talent Gap’. This Cyber Talent Gap has resulted in an increasingly vulnerable SMB ecosystem. And because most threat actors are opportunistic by nature, over half of all cyber-attacks target small and midmarket businesses. In fact, in the year 2018 alone, there was a 424% increase in the confirmed number of breaches within the SMB ecosystem.

Most small and midmarket business executives recognize action needs to be taken and 77% of them have concluded outsourcing their security to a specialized firm is the best response strategy.

Highground Cyber’s Virtual Red Team or VRT model was designed from the ground up to address the Cyber Talent Gap, fractionalizing the services of an experienced and certified Red Team. Furthermore, the VRT can be tailored to the unique needs of each organization and the requirements of its Cybersecurity & Privacy Program, ensuring that you have everything you need and nothing you don’t from the standpoint of cyber talent.

The bottom line is that for less than the cost of one full-time employee, you gain access to a broad range of experienced and certified information security professionals who know what to do, when to do it, and, most importantly, why they are doing it.