When the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tested defenses for two targets — one in the government sector and the other in the water sector — red teamers were able to get into both of their systems, but the water organization discovered the simulated attack and acted to defend itself, whereas the government organization did neither.
CISA published the breakdown Tuesday in a rare public report on its red-team activities, at a time when attacks on the water sector have a higher profile after revelations of targeting of water facilities across the United States over the past month and numerous government warnings.
The agency didn’t name the organizations it tested through a process that is voluntary and by-request.
“In one organization (Organization A), the team gained initial access to multiple workstations, gained elevated privileges over the domain, and moved laterally to [sensitive business systems] and cloud resources undetected,” CISA’s analysis reads. “In the second organization (Organization B), network defenders quickly detected the initial compromise and quarantined the affected systems.”
For “Organization A,” the government organization, CISA used an internal email address to send phishing emails to gain access to the workstations, probed further to gain elevated privileges, then moved around and compromised targeted sensitive business systems. The red teamers observed that the organization “did not respond effectively to red team activity” by accessing personnel emails at its security operations center, where they saw them receive low- and medium-severity endpoint detection and response alerts, but didn’t respond to them.
False positives by the thousands, including some with higher severity, “obscured the alerts triggered by red team activity,” CISA said. The agency also faulted “organizational silos.”