What Is a Purple Team in Cybersecurity?

What Is a Purple Team?

According to the SANS Institute, a purple team represents the collaborative fusion of red team and blue team working together to strengthen your organization’s defense capabilities.

Purple Team Approach

Purple teaming combines the attack simulation expertise of red teams with the defensive monitoring and response capabilities of blue teams. These exercises are time-boxed and iterative, and are often mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Purple teaming ensures that offensive and defensive security teams learn from each other in real-time to improve your organization’s overall security posture.

What Is the Purpose of Purple Teaming?

Purple teaming includes not just a simulation of an attack on target systems, but also a deep analysis and correction of the defender team’s actions. The blue team gets an in-depth review of known tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) of attackers. The red team, in turn, receives feedback from the blue team for further evaluation and improvement of the attack scenarios.

Purple teaming provides you with a more detailed and reliable overview of your cybersecurity and answers the following questions:

• What attackers’ actions are visible to the information security team
• What conditions provide this level of visibility
• Which of the attacker actions go unnoticed

Also, as a result of purple teaming, you get practical recommendations on how to improve the quality of counteraction in the cybersecurity team and reduce the time for detection and response to the actions of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.

Purple Team Responsibilities

The key responsibilities of a purple team are to facilitate structured interactions between red and blue teams and guide improvements for maximum results. Each team retains distinct responsibilities while the purple team aligns efforts towards shared security objectives for improved detection and response capabilities.

Red Team Responsibilities

Red teams are responsible for:

• Conducting realistic attack simulations that mirror real-world threat actor behavior.
• Documenting every step of their attack methodology, including successful techniques, failed attempts, and tools used.
• Providing educational value to the blue team by sharing detailed timelines and outcomes of attack scenarios.

Measurable outcomes:

• Percentage of attack techniques that bypassed detection.
• Number of documented TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) shared with the blue team.
• Number of new detection rules or playbooks created based on red team findings.

Blue Team Responsibilities

Blue teams are responsible for:

• Detecting, analyzing, and responding to red team activities using existing security tools and procedures.
• Documenting detection capabilities, response procedures, and any gaps identified during the exercise.
• Investigating security alerts, implementing containment measures, and maintaining detailed logs of defensive actions.

Measurable outcomes:

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) to red team actions.
• The number of missed detections or false positives reduced post-exercise.
• Increase in detection coverage across mapped MITRE ATT&CK techniques.

Purple Team Responsibilities

Purple teams are responsible for:

• Being the collaborative bridge between red and blue teams.
• Coordinating the exercise timeline, facilitating communication, and ensuring knowledge transfer between teams.
• Synthesizing findings from red and blue team activities to provide strategic recommendations for improving the organization’s security posture.

Measurable outcomes:

• Reduction in dwell time across retest cycles.
• Number of actionable recommendations implemented within a defined timeframe.
• Deployment of new or improved detection rules and response procedures.

How Does Purple Teaming Work?

Purple teaming follows a structured six-stage process designed to maximize collaboration and learning. Throughout the exercise, the purple team is responsible for overall coordination, ensuring each phase stays aligned with objectives and that all activities are properly approved.

The red team executes the attack scenarios while carefully documenting each step to simulate real-world adversary behavior. Meanwhile, the blue team works to detect, analyze, and respond to these simulated threats using existing tools and procedures. At each milestone, leadership is kept informed to maintain visibility and support decision-making.

We explain each stage of a purple teaming exercise in more detail below.

Purple Team Process Stages:

Stage 1: Preparation

This stage is dedicated to forming the preliminary picture of the target object and its weak points from the point of view of the attacker. The red team compiles a profile of an attacker they should mimic. Blue team also conducts an express audit of the incident detection rule settings to understand which rules can work during attacks.

Stage 2: Planning an Attack

The red team determines initial attack vectors and entry points to infiltrate the target organization’s infrastructure. All parties agree on the boundaries of the project and determine permissible and unacceptable risks. The result of this stage is the final attack scenario.

Stage 3: Conducting the Attack

The red team emulates an attack according to the scenario and tracks the result of each step to pinpoint what actions brought the desired results. Meanwhile, the blue team tries to detect the “attackers” actions and respond. In the end, the red team provides the blue team with a timeline of all its actions and the results for analysis.

Stage 4: Incident Analysis

The blue team analyzes the timeline of attacks and checks for events that are monitored. The goal is to spot the following: successfully detected and blocked attacks, undiscovered incidents, detection rules triggered, etc.

Stage 5: Report and Recommendations

The purple teaming provider generates a final report describing the attacks carried out, discovered vulnerabilities and weak spots in infrastructure and processes, and remediation recommendations.

Stage 6: Retest

Armed with the recommendations from a purple teaming report, information security specialists make adjustments. After it, the attack can be repeated to check the correctness of the settings.

Benefits of Running a Purple Teaming Exercise

The benefits of purple teaming include enhanced visibility across real-world attack paths, improved collaboration between red and blue teams, and accelerated incident response capabilities. These benefits extend beyond traditional security testing to create lasting improvements to your security operations center (SOC).

1. Accelerated Security Team Development

Purple teaming provides hands-on training opportunities that accelerate skill development and help your team stay current with evolving threats. They also gain both offensive and defensive perspectives that boost their overall effectiveness.

2. Enhanced Threat Detection Accuracy

Collaborative purple team exercises help you fine-tune detection rules and monitoring systems to reduce false positives while improving detection of genuine threats.Your security team develops better intuition for distinguishing between genuine threats and benign activities.

3. Improved Security ROI

Purple teaming helps you optimize your security investments by identifying which tools and procedures provide the greatest value for your specific environment. Armed with this insight, you can make data-driven decisions about security tool selection and configuration based on demonstrated effectiveness.

4. Real-World Threat Preparedness

Purple team exercises expose your security team to realistic attack scenarios that mirror current threat actor capabilities and techniques. Your SOC develops improved incident response capabilities for various attack types, enhancing threat preparedness.

Tools and Techniques Used in Purple Teaming

Purple team security exercises utilize a comprehensive toolkit that combines offensive security tools with defensive monitoring and analysis capabilities. The selection of tools and techniques depends on your organization’s specific technology stack and threat landscape.

1. Offensive Security Tools

Red team members utilize industry-standard penetration testing tools and frameworks to simulate realistic attack scenarios. These tools include network scanning utilities, vulnerability exploitation frameworks, and social engineering platforms that mirror real-world threat actor capabilities.

Popular offensive tools include Metasploit for exploitation, Cobalt Strike for command and control simulation, and custom scripts for environment-specific attack scenarios. Your red team may also utilize open-source intelligence gathering tools to replicate the reconnaissance activities of actual threat actors.

2. Defensive Monitoring Tools

Blue teams use existing security information and event management (SIEM) systems, endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, and network monitoring tools to detect and analyze attack activities. These tools provide the foundation for understanding your current detection capabilities.

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms help your blue team streamline response procedures and maintain consistent incident handling processes. Log analysis tools and threat intelligence platforms provide additional context for security event investigation.

3. Collaboration Platforms

Purple teaming requires specialized collaboration tools that enable real-time communication and knowledge sharing between offensive and defensive teams. These platforms facilitate the documentation and analysis activities that are central to purple team success.

Threat hunting platforms and attack simulation tools help bridge the gap between offensive and defensive activities, providing common frameworks for understanding and analyzing security events. Documentation platforms ensure that insights and lessons learned are captured and shared effectively.

4. MITRE ATT&CK Framework Integration

Many purple team exercises utilize the MITRE ATT&CK framework as a common language for describing attack techniques and defensive countermeasures. Every exercise is mapped at the sub-technique level, and you receive a color-coded coverage matrix showing which behaviors were executed, detected, or missed. This framework provides structure for planning exercises and analyzing results across different attack vectors.

What Are the Differences Between Red and Purple Teaming?

Red teaming and purple teaming both simulate cyberattacks, but they differ significantly in purpose, execution, and collaboration. Red teaming focuses on independently testing an organization’s defenses by mimicking real-world adversaries, often without the defenders’ knowledge. In contrast, purple teaming emphasizes collaboration between offensive and defensive teams to improve detection, response, and overall security posture. These differences span goals, team awareness, scope, communication, and outcomes.

We explore each of these distinctions in detail below.

Goals

Red teaming is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the cybersecurity team in countering targeted attacks. Meanwhile, purple teaming is focused on training the information security specialists and improving processes and technologies to increase resilience to current threats.

Awareness

Red teaming exercises maintain operational security by keeping blue team members unaware of the exercise, ensuring that defensive responses reflect real-world capabilities and procedures. Meanwhile, purple teaming requires transparency and continuous communication between teams to maximize educational value.

Scope

Red teaming implies using all approved methods for achieving the goal of an exercise. Purple teaming is limited by scenarios developed according to the customer-specific threat landscape. These scenarios include likeliest attack vectors, typical tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and highest risk assets

Methodology

Red teaming uses a comprehensive approach that mimics the actions of a real attacker, including attacks on the physical security of the perimeter, attacks on wireless technologies, social engineering, and other methods. Purple teaming uses the tools and approaches of the red team and blue team in close cooperation.

Outcomes

Red teaming produces comprehensive reports documenting successful attack paths, identified vulnerabilities, and recommendations for security improvements. On the other hand, purple teaming generates collaborative reports that document both attack methodologies and defensive responses, providing detailed insights into security gaps and specific recommendations for improvement.

When Should Organizations Use a Purple Team?

Organizations should consider implementing purple team testing when they need to enhance their security team’s capabilities, improve existing security processes, or validate the effectiveness of recent security investments. The collaborative nature of purple teaming makes it particularly valuable for organizations with established security programs seeking continuous improvement.

Purple Team Readiness Assessment

Your organization is ready for purple teaming if:

• You have dedicated security personnel
• Basic SIEM/monitoring tools are implemented
• Incident response procedures exist
• Security team seeks skill development
• Budget allows for extended engagements

Consider red teaming or vulnerability assessments if:

• Security program is in early stages
• Limited security tools and processes
• No dedicated security personnel
• Primary need is vulnerability identification

Security Program Maturity Requirements

Purple teaming works best for organizations with mature security programs that have established monitoring capabilities and incident response procedures. Your organization should have dedicated security personnel and basic security tools in place before pursuing purple team exercises.

Organizations with less developed security programs may benefit more from traditional red team testing or security assessments that focus on identifying fundamental vulnerabilities before moving to collaborative improvement methodologies.

Skill Development Objectives

Purple teaming is ideal when your primary objective is developing your security team’s skills and capabilities rather than simply identifying vulnerabilities. The collaborative approach provides hands-on training opportunities that accelerate professional development.

Organizations seeking to cross-train security personnel in both offensive and defensive techniques will find purple teaming particularly valuable for building well-rounded security professionals who understand both attack and defense perspectives.

Compliance and Regulatory Considerations

Some regulatory frameworks and compliance requirements may favor purple teaming approaches that emphasize continuous improvement and collaborative learning over traditional adversarial testing methodologies.

Organizations in highly regulated industries may find that purple teaming provides better documentation of security improvement efforts and demonstrates proactive security program management to regulatory authorities.

Budget and Resource Allocation

Purple teaming typically requires more time and resources than traditional red team testing due to the collaborative analysis and documentation requirements. Organizations should ensure they have adequate budget and personnel availability to support the extended engagement timeline.

The return on investment for purple teaming is typically higher than traditional testing approaches due to the enhanced learning opportunities and immediate security improvements that result from collaborative analysis.

How Group-IB Supports Your Purple Team Strategy

Purple team cycles can be hard to sustain due to recurring challenges from limited time and resources to deciding which security gaps and attacker methods matter most for your organizations’ security posture. These hurdles can persist regardless of the maturity level of your security program, undermining the ROI and effectiveness of your purple team strategy.

Group-IB’s comprehensive approach addresses these challenges by providing expert guidance and tailored solutions that make purple team implementation both practical and sustainable for your organization. Red teaming services bring real-world attack simulation expertise that mirrors APT behaviors, ensuring purple teaming exercises reflect the latest threat scenarios. Group-IB Incident Response Readiness Assessment can validate your team’s preparedness in executing response workflows under pressure.

Get in touch with our experts today to discover these solutions create a continuous improvement cycle that supports your purple teaming strategy.