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Security

What is purple team?

A purple team is red and blue teams working together in the open, running one attack technique at a time and tuning detections after each step.

What is a purple team?

A purple team is a way of running security testing in which the attackers (red team) and the defenders (blue team) cooperate instead of competing. Sometimes it is a standing group; more often it is an exercise format that puts both teams in the same room or on the same call. The goal is to improve detection and response quickly, one technique at a time, and to move knowledge in both directions.

How a purple team exercise runs

  1. The teams agree on a list of techniques to test, often picked from MITRE ATT&CK based on the threats most relevant to the organization.
  2. The red team runs one technique on an approved test system.
  3. The blue team checks whether the telemetry arrived and whether an alert fired.
  4. If not, both sides work out why and tune a rule, add a log source or change a configuration.
  5. The technique is run again to confirm the new detection works, and then the next one begins.

Strengths and limits

Purple teaming makes measurable progress fast. By the end of a session the organization knows which techniques it can see and has fixed some it could not. Analysts learn what an attack actually looks like in their own tools, and testers learn which of their steps are noisy. The limit is that defenders know exactly what is coming and when, so the exercise cannot show how the SOC would react to a genuine surprise. Many programs alternate: purple sessions to build coverage, then a covert red team engagement to test it.

Example scenario

A company's detection coverage map shows a blank for persistence through scheduled tasks. In a half-day session, the red team creates a scheduled task on a lab host. The blue team finds that the event was logged but that no rule used it, and the two teams write and test a detection together. The coverage map is updated the same afternoon.

Purple team vs. red team vs. blue team

Red teams attack, often covertly, to test real readiness. Blue teams defend and are the subject of defensive testing. Purple teaming combines the two in the open, giving up realism in exchange for faster improvement. A tabletop exercise is different again: it is a discussion of a scenario, with no systems touched.

Purple team on the CompTIA Security+ exam

SY0-801 objective 5.5 lists integrated testing among penetration testing types, and purple teaming is the common name for it. Scenario clues: attackers and defenders working side by side, sharing results in real time, testing a technique and tuning detections before the next one. Distractors include red team or offensive testing, where defenders are usually kept unaware; blue team or defensive testing on its own; and a tabletop exercise, which has no live activity.

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Related terms

blue team

A blue team is the defending side in security operations and exercises: the SOC analysts, responders and engineers who detect and contain attacks.

MITRE ATT&CK

MITRE ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge) is a public knowledge base of real-world attacker tactics and techniques.

penetration testing

Penetration testing is an authorized, scoped simulated attack in which testers exploit weaknesses to show what a real attacker could achieve.

red team

A red team is a group that plays the attacker in an authorized exercise, emulating a real adversary to test whether defenders can detect and respond.

siem

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is a technology that combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware.

tabletop exercise

A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based session in which key staff talk through an incident or disaster scenario to test a plan, with no systems touched.

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