The best way to describe how the blue team works is with a soccer team analogy. The blue team, comprised of your organization’s cybersecurity professionals, is the line of defense for your organization against all potential threats, such as phishing attacks and suspicious activity.

One of the first steps in the blue team’s work, or defensive line, is to understand the organization’s security strategy. This step is crucial for gathering the necessary data to put together a defense plan against real-world attacks.

Prior to the defense plan, blue teams collect all information regarding what areas need protection and perform a risk assessment. During this testing period, the blue team identifies the critical assets and notes the importance of each one, along with DNS audits and capturing network traffic samples. Once the team identifies those assets, they can conduct a risk assessment to identify threats against each asset and uncover any visible weaknesses or configuration issues. This assessment is like on a soccer team when coaches and players discuss past plays, what went well and what went wrong.

Once the assessment is complete, the blue team puts safety measures in place, such as further educating employees on the safety procedures and strengthening password rules. Implementing safety measures is like creating new plays to test out to see how well they work in soccer. After establishing the defense plan, the blue team’s role is to instill monitoring tools that can detect for signs of intrusion, investigate alerts and respond to unusual activity.