The blue team mission¶
Blue teams exist to protect organisational assets, detect security incidents, and maintain operational security. Defence isn’t passive: it requires active monitoring, hunting, and continuous improvement.
What blue teaming is¶
Detection and monitoring: Continuously watching for indicators of compromise, anomalous behaviour, and security events across networks, systems, and applications.
Incident response: Rapidly containing, investigating, and remediating security incidents when they occur. Minimising damage and restoring operations.
Threat hunting: Proactively searching for adversaries who have evaded automated defences. Hypothesis-driven investigation of potential compromises.
Defence hardening: Implementing security controls, patching vulnerabilities, and reducing attack surface based on threat intelligence and lessons learned.
Recovery and resilience: Ensuring systems can recover from incidents. Backup procedures, disaster recovery plans, business continuity.
What blue teaming is not¶
Pure compliance: Meeting regulatory checkboxes without ensuring controls actually work against real attacks. Compliance is necessary, not sufficient.
Alert fatigue management: Tuning security systems isn’t just about reducing false positives. It’s about improving detection of real threats.
Firewall administration: Managing security infrastructure is part of blue teaming, but it’s not the whole job. Blue team must think like attackers to anticipate and counter their moves.
Incident forensics alone: Understanding what happened is important, but preventing recurrence and improving defences matters more.