To Become a Truly Competent Blue Teamer, Take Red Team Courses

ByCyberResearchHub

When most people start their journey into blue teaming and SoC Analyst roles (defensive work) they gravitate toward blue team certifications. That makes sense on the surface. After all, if you want to defend against attacks, shouldn’t you study how to detect them?

Well… yes and no.

Blue team certs like Security+, CySA+, or even more advanced ones like GCIA or GCED do serve a purpose. They’ll teach you how to use some tools, analyze logs, and understand common attack techniques. But here’s the problem: they only show you what an attack might look like from the outside.

If you want to become a truly competent blue teamer, someone who can detect, dissect, and defend against real threats not just textbook ones you need to understand how attackers think, operate, and exploit systems.

And that means… taking a Red Team training course.

Why Red Team Training Makes You a Better Defender

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not talking about OSCP. While it has its value, it tends to focus more on CTF-style pentesting than real-world adversary simulation. What you want is a Red Team course that mirrors real attacker behavior, where you’re taught how to stealthily gain access, persist, and evade detection without using any frameworks or tools.

Most hackers do not install Metasploit or run nmap, most of there work is done in powershell and other LOLbins found on the network. They act more like system administrators going rogue than “attackers” your taught in the cyber zeitgeist.

The key difference here is you are not taught to go around scanning the network (which most attackers wont actually do) as that is generally what a penetration tester does because pentesting is more of an audit than a simulation.

In these kinds of courses, you’ll:

  • Download malware via PowerShell using commands like wget or .NET WebClient.
  • Use LOLBins (Living Off the Land Binaries) to execute payloads without triggering basic security tools.
  • Move laterally within networks, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data just like a real attacker would.

And most importantly, you’ll learn why these methods work, not just how to read text in a SIEM. You will see something suspicious and think that looks like someone trying to download, that looks like someone searching through files, that looks like someone running lolbins, not because you’ve seen a similar piece of text in a log before but because you’ve actually lived and breathed that side of the attack.

That kind of hands-on, offensive training gives you a mental model of how attackers think. So when you’re on the blue team:

  • You don’t just look at logs you understand what you’re seeing.
  • You can identify not just known IOCs, but behavioral patterns.
  • You’ll write better detections, build better defenses, and think several steps ahead.

Real Attacks Don’t Look Like Training Labs

Blue team training environments often show idealized versions of attacks: clean, obvious logs, textbook command-line entries, and easily recognizable tools.

But attackers are smarter than that. Real-world attacks are noisy, messy, and often intentionally obfuscated. If you’ve never been on the offensive side, you won’t know what to look for when attackers are trying to hide.

That’s why people who’ve done Red Team training even if they never go full red team—tend to become far stronger defenders.

On top of that, you’ll be able to carry out attacks yourself and then identify them in the SIEM giving you the ability to create your own alerts and build detection rules based on real activity.

The Path Forward

If you’re serious about becoming a competent blue teamer, here’s a better path:

  1. Learn the fundamentals (networking, operating systems, threat intel).
  2. Skip the traditional blue team certs at least for now.
  3. Take a Red Team Operator course, especially one that focuses on real-world adversary simulation.
  4. Build a lab and replicate attacks yourself. Then practice detecting them.

From then on during interviews you can discuss how you TRULY understand whats happening under the surface of an attack and you will stand out from the crowd among your colleagues and competition.

Blue teaming isn’t about watching logs go by it’s about being one step ahead of the adversary. And to do that, you have to learn how they think.

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