Tiger team
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A tiger team is a specialized group tasked with testing the effectiveness of an organization's ability to protect assets by attempting to circumvent, defeat, or otherwise thwart that organization's internal and external security.
[edit] Overview
The term originated within the military to describe a team whose purpose is to penetrate security of "friendly" installations, and thus test their security measures. The members are professionals who install evidence of their success, e.g. leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your codebooks have been stolen" (they usually have not been) inside safes, etc. Sometimes, after a successful penetration, a high-ranking security person will show up later for a "security review," and "find" the evidence. Alternately, the team can present evidence of their success in person; such scenarios usually involve consummated theft (i.e. of money) and can be legally shaky for the team's members.
Afterward, the term became popular in the computer industry, where the security of computer systems is often tested by tiger teams; one of the earliest examples was with the Multics operating system. A subset of tiger teams is professional hackers, testing the security of military computer installations by attempting remote attacks through networks or supposedly "secure" communication channels.
In the computer security field, the term is now used less often, and more common terms are penetration testers or security testers. Security assessment testing of a computer system or network infrastructure is called penetration testing.
Outside the computer security field, It has become an overused buzzword in some corporate environments, periodically satirized in the Dilbert comic strip.
The term is still used to refer to any official inspection team or special "fire fighting" group called in to look at a problem from outside the box. Referring to a team set up solely in response to a specific situation or problem, without considering any wider or longer-term issues. The team typically operates (at least partially) outside the normal chain of command, and reports directly to a higher company officer. Particularly in aerospace engineering, tiger teams would often attack thorny technical problems that appeared late in the design phase. For example, tiger teams are often appointed to explore weight reduction measures when aircraft or spacecraft under development are too heavy, yet no easy weight reduction measures are obvious. The term has also been used operationally, as when a tiger team led by Gene Kranz was appointed to coordinate the safe return of Apollo 13 after the explosion that damaged it.
[edit] See also
- Sneakers (1992)
- Red Cell US Navy SEAL Tiger Team
- Tiger Team television show on Court TV (TruTV)
- Lares Consulting (Tiger Team used in TV Series)
- Proactive Risk
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.
