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Introduction

This introduction sets the stage by defining traditional security roles and relating them to the Generative AI (GenAI) context.


🌈 Rainbow of Colors

The security landscape is often described using a spectrum of colors, representing different roles and methodologies. To use this book effectively, you need to understand these distinctions.

Black Hat Hackers

Malicious actors who seek to compromise systems for personal gain, espionage, or destruction. In the GenAI context, black hats may attempt to bypass safety filters (jailbreaking), inject malicious prompts to manipulate model behavior, poison documents, etc. Their actions are unauthorized and illegal.

White Hat and Ethical Hackers

Security researchers and professionals who use their skills to identify vulnerabilities with the goal of fixing them. They operate with permission and follow responsible disclosure practices. Ethical hackers are currently at the forefront of discovering novel GenAI vulnerabilities such as indirect prompt injection and data leakage, helping organizations patch these holes before they can be exploited.

Red Teams

Red Teams are effectively White Hat hackers who adopt the persona of Black Hats. They operate with authorization to simulate the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) of real-world adversaries to test an organization’s defenses.

A GenAI Red Team adopts the mindset of an attacker to rigorously stress-test GenAI models and agents. They go beyond standard vulnerability scanning to execute complex, multi-stage attack chains, probing for weaknesses in the model’s logic, its access to tools, and its integration with the broader IT environment.

It is important to distinguish Red Teaming from Penetration Testing (Pentesting), as the terms are often used interchangeably but represent different approaches.

  • Penetration Testing is typically time-boxed and scope-limited, focusing on identifying as many vulnerabilities as possible within a specific system or application. For example, in the context of GenAI, a penetration test might attempt to find a chatbot’s vulnerability to a pre-defined set of prompt injection attacks.

  • Red Teaming is objective-driven and adversarial. It simulates a full-spectrum attack to test not just the technology, but also the organization’s people, processes, and detection capabilities. A Red Team operation might attempt to use a GenAI agent to pivot into the internal network or exfiltrate sensitive data without triggering security alerts, mimicking the tactics of a sophisticated threat actor.

Blue Teams

Blue Teams are White Hat security professionals dedicated to defense. They are responsible for maintaining the security posture of the organization. They monitor infrastructure, analyze logs, and respond to incidents. For GenAI, Blue Teams face new challenges: distinguishing between benign and malicious prompts, monitoring for model drift or hallucination that indicates an attack, and securing the AI supply chain against compromised dependencies.

Purple Teams

Purple Teaming represents a collaborative approach that bridges the gap between offensive (Red) and defensive (Blue) teams. Instead of operating in silos, these teams work together to maximize the organization’s cyber resilience. Many time the Purple Team is not a distinct team but a role played by members of the Red and Blue Teams through collaboration.

The primary goal of Purple Teaming is to safely simulate specific attacks against production defenses to prove they are working. This involves defining evaluation test cases, such as verifying if a specific guardrail blocks a known jailbreak prompt, and tuning detection logic based on the results.