PlexTrac ConceptsPurple Teaming

Purple teaming is a process where teams work together to test, measure, and improve defensive security posture (people, process, and technology) by emulating tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of adversaries.

Traditionally, a purple team is considered an offensive red team or penetration testing team collaborating with a subset of the defensive blue team to conduct a concrete, point-in-time assessment. The goal of purple teaming is to identify a control, test attack tactics and techniques on that control, and collaborate with the blue team to remediate and improve the defenses on that control.

Purple teaming is the collaborative function performed by red teams and blue teams to mitigate risks and vulnerabilities by strategically combining their efforts. Through collaborative testing and remediation, purple teaming breaks down barriers, improves communication, and levels up each team’s skills. Additionally, the team effort helps reduce the mean time to detect and remediate reported threats.

Some core functions of purple teaming include:

• Simulating real-world attacks to test defenses.
• Improving threat detection capabilities by analyzing attackers’ methods.
• Gathering intelligence from both offensive and defensive activities.
• Speeding up incident response through blue and red team efforts.
• Fostering communication between teams to share skills and knowledge.
• Identifying weaknesses and taking corrective actions based on learnings from the exercises.

Purple teaming is a collaboration between red teaming and blue teaming activities, often in real-time, to strengthen the attack surface. Just like color mixing, it combines defensive and offensive strategies to detect, respond to, and stop cyber threats.

Blue teaming focuses on defensive tactics such as threat hunting and incident response. Blue teamers protect the organization through proactive and preventive measures. They defend against real or simulated exploitation by identifying anomalies that could indicate nefarious activity and remediating them to prevent or mitigate the damage of cyber attacks.

In contrast, red teaming focuses on offensive tactics such as pentesting and simulating real-world attacks to exploit vulnerabilities and pinpoint security weaknesses before real adversaries can do so.

Watch this video to learn more about red, blue, and purple team collaboration.

PlexTrac was built with the goal to make collaborative security practices like purple teaming accessible and efficient for security teams of all sizes.  Our innovative platform offers solutions across the security lifecycle, improving effectiveness, efficiency, and collaboration in red team workflows, blue team remediation, and collaborative purple teaming efforts. PlexTrac Runbooks provides a space to house custom and industry standard test plans from MITRE Engenuity, BlindSPOT, and SCYTHE and supports real-time collaboration between teams.

PlexTrac is a penetration test reporting and collaboration platform that makes security data aggregation, red and blue team reporting, purple team collaboration, and remediation tracking more effective and efficient.

Simply put, PlexTrac is the ultimate purple teaming platform. Book a demo to see how our platform can help your team today.

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