Hasta La Vista, Passive Defense: Why Blue Teams Need an Offensive Edge

In a world of ever-evolving tactics, techniques, procedures (TTPs) and relentless adversaries, it’s no longer enough for defenders to simply monitor, detect, and respond. You can’t wait for next-gen threats to come to you – you must go on the offensive to stay ahead.  

 

I’m not saying you need to send an advanced cyborg back in time to test yesterday’s defenses, but your blue team does need to adopt offensive mindsets and methods to stay ahead today. Now, as Arnold once said, come with me if you want to live.  

Adapting to a threat-led world

Traditional Security Operations Center (SOC) roles were built for known threats and predefined signatures. Attackers don’t play by those rules anymore. Understanding offensive tactics helps defenders anticipate attacker behaviors, prioritize real risks, and reduce alert fatigue. This proactive approach leads to more effective incident response and a threat-informed defense strategy.

Defensive teams that understand offensive logic are better at: 

• Anticipating lateral movement
• Introduction to Detection Engineering includes labs that analyze logs generated during lateral movement and use tools like Process Monitor and Sysmon.
• APT29: Threat Hunting with Elasticsearch can help you understand attacker tactics and techniques, which is crucial for anticipating lateral movement. 
• Recognizing attacker tradecraft
• Attacking the Active Directory is a critical skill in any offensive security professional's arsenal, involving setting manipulation and intentional misconfigurations to gain unauthorized access.
• Exploitation, Weaponization, and Delivery focuses on payload creation, obfuscation techniques, delivery methods, and communication techniques used in cyberattacks, providing hands-on experience with tools like Metasploit.
• Prioritizing real risk over alert fatigue
• Threat Hunting covers essential topics like threat research, digital forensics, and malware analysis, which are crucial for understanding and prioritizing alerts. The labs include a variety of tools like Wireshark, Process Monitor, and Volatility to analyze network traffic and investigate incidents, helping users to identify and respond to suspicious activities effectively.

If your blue team thinks like a red team, your incident response becomes threat-informed and dynamic.

Offensive skills that matter for defenders

Not everyone needs to have the skills of a full-time red teamer, but they do need to think critically about attacker behavior to protect critical assets cough cough John Connor 

We suggest focusing on these areas:

• Understanding how common tools behave in the wrong hands (C2 frameworks, privilege escalation chains)
• PoshC2 provides training on command and control frameworks, credential harvesting, system enumeration, and privilege escalation, all of which are crucial for operating under the assumption that a breach has occurred.  
• Scenario-based threat modeling and adversarial emulation
• Threat Modeling Fundamentals explores threat modeling, attack trees, and tools like Threat Dragon. These labs help teams identify vulnerabilities, understand different methodologies, and implement effective countermeasures.
• Reconnaissance is important for understanding and employing reconnaissance techniques essential to offensive operations.
• Exploit walkthroughs to reinforce detection and log analysis, recent campaigns, and the heavy-hitter offensive TTPs.
• BadSuccessor: Offensive
• CVE-2025-35433 (Erlang SSH): Offensive
• CVE-2025-31161 (CrushFTP): Offensive
• Water Gamayun: (CVE-2025-26633) Campaign Analysis
• Threat Actors: Salt Typhoon - SNAPPYBEE Campaign Analysis
• Command and Scripting Interpreter (T1059)
• Valid Accounts (T1078)
• Lateral Movement via Remote Services (T1021)

You should also think about:

• Cyber incident simulations with “adversary POVs”
• For hands-on training, explore our Pen Test CTF labs to build penetration testing and exploitation skills in a capture-the-flag format.
• Want to take exercising your teams to the next level? Talk to your account team about Cyber Range Exercises.  

Engaging in offensive security training raises awareness among employees about potential threats and attack vectors. This awareness fosters a security-first culture, encouraging proactive behaviors and vigilance across the organization. 

Prove and improve: planning for sustainable upskilling

The cybersecurity skills gap isn’t just a hiring problem - it’s a strategic opportunity. Building offensive awareness within defensive teams deepens technical expertise, sharpens detection logic, speeds up incident response, and improves threat prioritization.

Success doesn’t happen by accident – it requires a plan.  If you're John Connor maybe that plan is sending a Terminator back in time to protect your critical PI... but maybe your plan is partnering with Immersive to design a custom security program 😉

Sustainable upskilling starts with three core elements:

1. Baseline where you are today
   • Engage with Immersive Premium Support to conduct an Immersive assessment, or use Demonstrate labs across key tools and capabilities to baseline current skills.
   • You can also reference threat simulation results, or incident retrospectives to identify practical knowledge gaps. From there, define your target skills and security outcomes (e.g. improving lateral movement detection or reducing false positives), then build and execute a plan to get from A to B.
2. Design learning journeys, not one-offs
   • Structure development plans across 6-, 12-, and 18-month checkpoints. We recommend tailoring these to role-specific needs, but in the context of today’s blog, you also should consider use cases like:
     • Have your Tier 1 SOC analysts start by learning scripting and alert triage logic.
     • Challenge senior analysts to complete red team shadowing or participate in a DTF to strengthen threat hunting skills and hypotheses they can use in detection engineering.
3. Prove value through applied learning
   • Build defenders who can think and act with offensive context. Encourage applied projects like:
     • “Hack-your-fist” systems to better understand attacker behavior.
     • Logging analysis with an “assume breach” lens.
     • Injecting adversary POVs into tabletops or indecent retrospectives.

The new defender DNA

Defensive security is evolving. It’s no longer about who can triage the fastest – it’s about who can think like the threat and adapt in real time. 

Upskilling your blue team with red principles isn’t about turning defenders into pentesters. Give them the tools they need to defend with intent.  

Share your thoughts

Have you been leveling up your team’s offensive instincts? Is your blue team ready to terminate threats before they take root? Share your story in the comments below!

Don’t let your cyber resilience go offline this summer – stay sharp and threat-ready. Get updates on posts like this by following the Human Connection Blog!