Purple Teaming

A purple team in cybersecurity refers to a group of offensive red team or penetration testing team members that collaborate with the defensive blue team to conduct concrete, point-in-time assessments. 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.

The goal of purple teaming is to identify a security 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 an evolution of the traditional red and blue teams structure, which can often be siloed, and instead focuses on the collaboration and knowledge sharing between the two teams in order to maximize your defense against bad actors.

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, purple team efforts help reduce the mean time to detect and remediate reported threats.

According to a survey by the CyberRisk Alliance and PlexTrac, 88% of purple teaming users, compared to only 52% of red and blue team users, deemed their exercises as “very effective” in defending their organization against ransomware and advanced attacks. Sadly, red and blue teams can often be siloed within a security operations center (SOC); however, purple teaming exercises help align the teams and unify the organization’s security strategy.

Note that purple teaming is more of a concept than a specific role, and there are typically no dedicated purple team members. Security professionals are generally aligned with red or blue teams, with a mutually focused mission of detecting compromises and potential threats as early as possible within the attack lifecycle.

Some core functions of purple teaming include:

• Conducting real-world attack simulations to test defenses.
• Improving threat detection capabilities by analyzing attackers’ methods.
• Gathering threat intelligence from both offensive and defensive activities.
• Speeding up incident response through blue and red team efforts.
• Fostering effective communication between teams to share knowledge and best practices.
• Encouraging continuous learning between security personnel on different teams.
• Identifying weaknesses and taking corrective actions based on learnings from purple team exercises.

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

Table 1: The Difference Between Red, Blue, and Purple Teams

Blue teams, or defensive security teams, focus on defensive strategies and tactics such as threat hunting and incident response. Blue team members 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 teams, or offensive security teams, focus 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.

Here are a few effective examples of purple teaming to try when implementing purple team strategies.

Purple Teaming Example 1: Phishing for Knowledge Case Study

The red team performs a phishing simulation with an email that contains malicious attachments and custom payloads. On the blue side, analysts monitor email gateways as well as detections and response workflows to see how they respond to the phishing attempt.

This purple teaming use case validates the current detection and incident response processes. It also helps the cybersecurity team as a whole determine what they need to do to strengthen their defenses.

Purple Teaming Example 2: Alarming Alerts Case Study

The red team executes living-off-the-land attacks using PowerShell abuse and LOLBins. Meanwhile, the blue team monitors alerts triggered by their endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution and the logs within their security information and event management (SIEM) for false and accurate alerts.

This use case confirms that security controls are correctly detecting attacks and automatically alerting the blue team as soon as a security trigger is met, without creating unnecessary alert fatigue.

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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The Top 5 Collaboration Features in PlexTrac

PlexTrac for Blue Teamers

The Offensive Security Maturity Model: Get Ahead of Threats

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What is Blue Teaming?