Thinking About Starting Your Career as a Red Teamer? Here’s How!

Becoming part of an organization’s red team is one of the hottest jobs right now in the entire cybersecurity field. It’s all about the excitement of protecting organizational systems and networks by testing the established security measures, simulating cyber-attacks, and finding vulnerabilities before they become exploited by malicious hackers. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Becoming a Red Teamer means becoming more than a cybersecurity pro; it means becoming part of the squad of guardians and defenders of the entire organization. Such title requires advanced technical and soft skills to carry out some of the most sophisticated attacks currently known.

In short words, a Red Teamer is an ethical hacker that has been hired by an organization to legally - and ethically - breaking into its systems to find flaws by conducting pen testing activities. Taking that into account, how do you actually become one?

According to cybersecurity specialized sources such as Trustwave, a Red Teamer requires a special skill set that includes:

• Networking knowledge to understand how services work and where their vulnerabilities might be.

• Having advanced coding skills to conduct research and implement changes in the organization’s current code.

• Being curious enough to dig on the latest techniques and trends, tool releases, patches, and exploited vulnerabilities. Keep in mind that it’s not only important to know about them, but also to use them in favor of your organization’s security. 

• Being able to collaborate with others to share knowledge and get things done as a team.

• Conducting vulnerability assessments to identify flaws, penetration testing, and performing bug bounty activities.

Don’t know how to acquire these skills yet? Don’t worry, there are a bunch of opportunities out there to start your training to upskill and reskill! Consider for example using Seccuri’s Training Ecosystem to browse some of the best trainings and certifications by signing up to your Talent account or registering to our platform (in case you don’t already have one) using the following link: https://platform.seccuri.com/#/sign-in

In our platform, you will be able to track your career advances as a Red Team Professional, as you complete all the training and certifications required to obtain the required skills.

Besides using our Seccuri Training Ecosystem (or any other training source), there are other specialized resources available to help you become an amazing Red Teamer. Some books of great selection include for example “The Hacker Playbook”, “Red Team Development and Operations” and websites such as iRead Team and The Hacker Recipes that offer interesting information such as step-by-step guides for conducting certain types of attacks.

Becoming a Red Teamer is definitely the way to go if you are looking for a challenging yet exciting cybersecurity job position in an organization. Don’t wait any longer to start exploring this career path!

Sources: Trustwave, INFOSEC, Seccuri