What is Purple Teaming? 

In the world of cybersecurity, we often talk about two main groups: the attackers and the defenders. The Red Team simulates attacks to test the organization's limits, while the Blue Team works around the clock to defend against real-world threats. Traditionally, these two teams have worked in isolation, creating a wall between their functions.

But what if, instead of working against each other, they worked with each other? This collaborative philosophy is the driving force behind Purple Teaming, one of the most effective approaches to strengthening an organization's security posture.

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Understanding Red Teams and Blue Teams

To understand Purple Teaming, it's important to first know the roles of the two teams it brings together:

• The Red Team (Offensive Security): This team plays the role of the adversary. They use the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) as real-world attackers to simulate attacks and test the effectiveness of the organization's security controls, processes, and people.
• The Blue Team (Defensive Security): This is the team responsible for defense. They manage the security controls, monitor for threats, investigate alerts, and respond to incidents. They are the front line protecting the organization's assets.

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Purple Team: A Collaborative Approach

A Purple Team is not a separate, permanent team. Instead, purple teaming is a functional team where the Red and Blue teams work together in a collaborative and open manner. The "purple" symbolizes the mixing of red and blue.

The primary goal of a purple team exercise is to improve an organization's detection and response capabilities through immediate feedback. Instead of the Red Team conducting a secret attack and delivering a report weeks later, both teams are in the same room (physically or virtually), sharing information in real-time.

In some organizations, the purple team is a virtual team (i.e., there are no actual purple team employees) and the blue and red team members join together from time to time to create this purple team. In other organizations, the purple team is embedded within the detection engineering team and SOC supervision.

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The Benefits of The Purple Team

This collaborative approach delivers powerful benefits that traditional, siloed testing cannot.

• Immediate Feedback and Rapid Improvement: When the Red Team executes a technique, the Blue Team can immediately check if their tools detected it. If not, they can work together on the spot to understand the gap and begin writing a new detection rule. This shrinks the improvement cycle from weeks to few hours.
• Breaking Down Silos Through Knowledge Sharing: Blue Team members learn firsthand about attacker methodologies, helping them think more like an adversary. At the same time, the Red Team gains a deeper understanding of the defensive tools and their limitations, allowing them to create more realistic and valuable tests.
• Real-Time Validation of Security Controls: A purple team exercise provides concrete, immediate proof of whether a specific security control or detection rule is working as intended. This data-driven approach removes assumptions and validates security investments.

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The Purple Teaming Process: A High-Level View

A typical purple team exercise is a structured, open engagement that follows a simple loop:

1. Plan: The Red and Blue teams agree on the scope of the exercise, often focusing on specific adversary techniques from a framework like MITRE ATT&CK.
2. Execute & Analyze: The Red Team announces and executes an attack technique. The Blue Team analyzes their security controls to see what was detected and logged.
3. Remediate & Re-test: If a detection was missed, the teams work together to improve configurations or create new detection logic. The Red Team can then re-run the technique to instantly validate the fix.
4. Document: The findings and improvements are documented to track progress and mature the security program.

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Conclusion

Purple teaming represents a cultural shift in cybersecurity. It transforms the adversarial relationship between attackers and defenders into a partnership focused on a single, shared objective: making the organization safer. By fostering open communication and creating an immediate feedback loop, purple teaming is one of the fastest and most effective ways to build a truly resilient security posture.

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How Thawd Enables a Purple Teaming Mindset

Effective purple teaming requires the ability to consistently test defenses against a wide range of attack techniques. Manually performing these Red Team actions can be time-consuming and difficult to scale.

Thawd's Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) solution, SimLight, automates the Red Team's role in this process. Our solution can safely and continuously execute thousands of adversary techniques across your environment. This provides the Blue Team with the constant stream of data they need to test, tune, and validate their detection capabilities. With SimLight, you can embed the principles of purple teaming into your daily operations, fostering a cycle of continuous improvement.

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