Blue Team Training

Blue team training equips cybersecurity defenders with the skills, knowledge, and experience they need to ward off cyber attacks coming from all angles with increasing frequency and tenacity. This particular form of professional development and employee upskilling has become more important as security teams seek to maximize the impact of their resources while minimizing the consequences of any incident. Blue team training could lead to successfully stopping attacks.

An Overview of Blue Team Training

What is blue team training?

Students learn concepts and skills relevant to cyber defenses. Unlike red team training, which teaches students how to think and act like hackers, blue team training focuses on seeing and stopping incoming attacks. Cyber defense is a vast and always-evolving concept, so any training on the subject is too, making it important for anyone charged with stopping cyber attacks to update their blue team training on a regular basis. Otherwise, the attackers have the advantage.

What does blue team training cover?

Blue team training may cover almost any topic since defenders must understand the offense as well as the defense. Also, trainings should always be tailored to the students and team receiving them so they fill gaps and build strengths instead of covering redundant or irrelevant concepts. However, some of the core concepts in blue team training include:

Detection and Response – Learning how to find evidence of inbound attacks then orchestrate the correct response.
Incident Response – Covering all stages in the incident response lifecycle so learners can respond faster and keep the damage contained.
Vulnerability Management – Demonstrating how to locate vulnerabilities in the attack surface and remediate them strategically.
Threat Hunting – Teaching how to uncover threats hidden in the network and remove them without doing damage in the process.
Forensic Analysis – Explaining how to analyze threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks to understand their risk and remediation requirements.

Who needs blue team training?

Certainly anyone serving on a blue team or equivalent needs this type of training. Anyone serving on a red team or equivalent could also benefit given the complementary nature of these skills. In practice, anyone interested or invested in cybersecurity benefits from updating and expanding their knowledge, especially as the threat landscape evolves. From security analysts and SOC teams to IT admins and threat hunters, blue team training benefits everyone—and without it, skills grow stale.

Why is Blue Team Training Expanding?

Why are more organizations seeking blue team training?

Two forces in particular are driving interest in blue team training at organizations of all sizes across all industry verticals. First is the skyrocketing cost of cyber incidents, which now averages over $4.8 million according to IBM. Wanting to avoid these unexpected losses at all costs, companies are seeking more defensive training in hopes of seeing attacks earlier and stopping them sooner. That relates to the second force: a shift from reactive to proactive cybersecurity. Security teams are increasingly making it their goal to proactively find and fix issues in order to prevent cyber attacks from starting, rather than counting on their ability to detect and respond to those attacks later on. Apparent across all facets of cybersecurity, this shift in priorities compels blue teams to take different approaches and seek new training.

How are blue team training methods evolving?

In addition to the previously mentioned shift from reactive to proactive cybersecurity, blue team training methods are evolving rapidly in how they’re delivered. In-depth, on-site trainings are giving way to more flexible, accessible, and on-demand training sessions, both to accommodate scheduling conflicts and to key pace with emerging threats. Furthermore, security teams are increasingly blending red team training and blue team training to develop “purple” skillsets informed by both. Increasingly, the line between red and blue teams is eroding as teams think less about offense and defense and more about being holistic and comprehensive in their approach.

What effects does blue team training have on cybersecurity?

Blue team training has a deep and direct impact on cybersecurity, and not just because students acquire new skills and knowledge with training. They are also exposed to simulations of real-world attacks, and they can draw on that experience if and when they encounter the same attacks in the wild. In that same vein, security teams get experience working with one another and problem solving collectively during blue team training, making them more effective as a unit in any stressful situation. Blue team training can have a positive effect on potentially everything.

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How to improve at blue team training?

Make it Mandatory: Requiring people to get blue team training ensures their skills stay sharp while keeping other obligations from crowding out professional development. If required, however, provide people the time and other resources to complete training.
Make it Useful;: Focus on the skills and subjects that will have the biggest impact on the blue team, and avoid everything else because those training will feel like a waste of time.
Make it Engaging: Interactive lessons, real-world examples, and hand-on exercise keep people engaged with the material so they remember and apply the lessons and buy-in to future training sessions.
Make it Accessible: Avoid making training feel like an inconvenience or distraction by breaking away from traditional training methods in favor of on-demand, digital, and short-form training sessions.

How Flare Supports Blue Team Training?

Does Flare offer blue team training?

The Flare Academy training series teaches cybersecurity teams, practitioners, students, and aficionados key skills in an accessible format. Many of the entries in that training series support blue team training in some fashion, either by demonstrating key skills and techniques or by exploring attacks and exploits that defenders need to know about. Though not to be considered comprehensive blue team training, Flare contributes a key piece, without which cyber defenses would not be as strong as they could or should be against constantly evolving adversaries.

How does Flare support blue team training?

It costs nothing to sign up for training with the Flare Academy. Led by a subject-matter expert, each one takes about two hours, comes with interactive exercise plus in-depth resources, and gives access to the Flare Academy Discord Community for questions and discussions. Attendees also earn one CPE credit for each completed session. In that way, blue teams have everything they need to get smarter, stronger, and better synchronized without the overhead and obligations that blue team training might otherwise involve.

What are the benefits of blue team training from Flare?

Free – All training sessions are free to attend or watch as videos afterwards, putting no stress on the cybersecurity budget and making it easy to offer at scale.
On Demand – Anyone can access training sessions at their convenience on any device so that getting training fits easily into every schedule and setting.
Expert Led – Trainers lead each session who have experience, expertise, and insights about the topics they are teaching.
Highly Relevant – Topics that are important to the present and future of cybersecurity, for both red and blue teams, are covered in each training session.