Actively protecting pen testers and pen testing assets
Summary
FireEye, a major security company, was attacked and adversaries accessed their internal red teaming tools (software used to test security by simulating attacks). The post warns that red teams are attractive targets for attackers and recommends implementing protective measures like honeypot machines (fake systems designed to detect intruders) and monitoring login attempts to quickly detect when attackers are trying to compromise their systems.
Solution / Mitigation
The source explicitly recommends several protective measures: (1) Create honeypot machines with fake credentials and trigger notifications and alerts when accessed; (2) Set up notifications for logon attempts and successful logons via email and forward events to the blue team (defensive security team); (3) Disable remote management endpoints and allow list source IP addresses in the firewall; (4) Lock down machines by blocking all inbound connections while allowing outbound ones using Windows command 'netsh advfirewall set allprofiles firewallpolicy blockinboundalways,allowoutbound' or Linux commands 'sudo ufw enable', 'sudo ufw default deny incoming', and 'sudo ufw default allow outgoing'; (5) Perform red vs. red testing (security assessments where one red team tests another) to verify the red team has proper security controls in place.
Classification
Original source: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2020/protecting-the-pentester/
First tracked: February 12, 2026 at 02:20 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%