What is the Purple Team in Cybersecurity? Purple Teaming Explained

Teaming exercises are a valuable way for organizations to practice responding to cyber threats and hone their defensive capabilities. However, these exercises are often limited to a simple attack-and-response cycle, which can miss important opportunities for collaboration.

Purple teaming bridges the gap between red teaming and blue teaming. It brings together the two teams to share insights and information, helping to foster a culture of continuous improvement. Ultimately, purple teaming helps boost the effectiveness of live fire exercises to strengthen offensive security and an organization’s overall security posture.

What is the Purple Team?

In a red team vs. blue team exercise, the red team, composed of ethical hackers, simulates attacks to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an organization's defenses. The blue team, consisting of the organization's security defenders, works to detect, respond, and mitigate the simulated threats. 

Organizations may use a cyber range simulation to provide a realistic and controlled environment for conducting these teaming exercises. The cyber range replicates the organization's network and systems, allowing the red team to launch attack scenarios while the blue team defends against them in a safe, isolated setting.

The purple team serves as an extension of the standard red and blue team exercise, facilitating the exchange of knowledge, findings, and insights between the two teams. It’s not a fixed separate entity but rather can be as simple as members of the red team and blue team working together to share their respective analyses and experiences.

Is the Purple Team Necessary?

The purple team plays a crucial role in making teaming exercises more effective and impactful. It creates a feedback loop that helps organizations continually improve their defensive strategies based on the insights gained from simulated attack-and-response scenarios. Without purple teaming, organizations may miss out on a valuable opportunity to bridge the gap between offensive and defensive cybersecurity measures.

Purple teaming fosters a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, equipping security teams with the necessary knowledge and skills to proactively defend against emerging cyber threats. It empowers organizations to identify and remediate potential vulnerabilities before adversaries can exploit them in real-world scenarios.

Examples of Purple Teaming

To understand how purple teaming exercises can enhance an organization’s overall security posture, let's go through an example of an organization that wants to conduct teaming exercises to strengthen its network security:

Set Teaming Goals

The first step is to establish clear goals for the red, purple, and blue teams. This ensures that their efforts are aligned with the organization's objectives and specific security concerns. For example, a red team's goal could be to identify potential weaknesses in an organization’s firewall rules, the blue team's goal might be to detect and respond to these attacks effectively, and the purple team's goal would be to gain insights around how to strengthen network security.

Analyze the Red Team Attack

In this phase, the red team carries out their attempt to infiltrate the organization’s defenses, while the blue team focuses on detecting their activities and defending against possible attacks. Continuing our network security example, the red team might engage in various penetration testing activities, aiming to breach the organization's firewalls. Knowing both teams will come together to discuss the exercise, the red team meticulously documents their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) while the blue team closely observes and documents the events they encounter on their end.

Communicate Security Gaps

After the teaming exercise, the red and blue teams come together to collaborate as one combined purple team. Thanks to their meticulous documentation, the red team shares comprehensive insights about their infiltration and evasion methods. This open sharing allows the blue team to ask questions, gaining a deeper understanding of how the attack was successful. As a result, the blue team learns valuable lessons about the defenses that were bypassed and identifies areas requiring immediate attention to enhance their security measures. 

Blue Team Tunes Defenses

Armed with the knowledge gained from the purple team, the blue team initiates their response. They create a comprehensive action plan to strengthen the network's defenses and enhance security measures. Adjustments may include technical fixes, such as updating firewall rules to close identified vulnerabilities and implementing network segmentation to compartmentalize and protect critical assets. Additionally, the blue team may introduce procedural changes, like refining their incident response plan or initiating a targeted training program for security professionals.

Repeat

The process doesn't end there. The red team uses the insights they gained from the process to refine their network security infiltration efforts to test the effectiveness of the blue team's countermeasures. The blue team continues to try to thwart the attack, making updates to their defense strategies based on the insights provided by the purple team. This iterative cycle continues until the cybersecurity team is confident in their network security measures. At that point, the team can start a new teaming exercise and repeat the process all over again.

Advantages of Purple Teaming

There are many benefits of purple teaming that organizations can leverage to optimize their cybersecurity strategies and improve their overall defense. Some of the key advantages include:

Improved Communication

While knowledge sharing is already an important part of a traditional red team vs. blue team exercise, purple teaming bakes knowledge-sharing directly into the process. This fosters open communication between the red and blue teams and allows for the exchange of questions and insights. By working together closely, the teams gain a deeper understanding of each other's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), breaking down silos and facilitating more effective cybersecurity measures.

Identification of Weaknesses

One of the primary benefits of teaming exercises is their ability to expose vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an organization's security infrastructure. During purple teaming, the blue team has the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and dive deeper into the nuances of the scenario in direct conversation with the red team. This interactive approach enables the blue team to better understand potential vulnerabilities that adversaries might exploit. By learning from the red team's tactics and techniques, the blue team can proactively identify weaknesses in the organization's security infrastructure and develop more effective countermeasures.

Enhanced Cyber Readiness

Cyber readiness is an organization's ability to swiftly and effectively identify, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks. Purple teaming plays a crucial role in helping organizations assess and elevate their state of cyber readiness. Deep knowledge-sharing allows the blue team to learn the nuances of specific scenarios and think more like attackers, enhancing their ability to proactively detect and thwart potential threats. By learning from the red team's perspective, the blue team can anticipate adversaries' strategies and tactics, enabling them to strengthen their defensive measures.

Development of a Positive Feedback Loop

The purple team process establishes a positive feedback loop that drives continuous improvement in an organization's cybersecurity defenses. The exercise’s emphasis on open communication and collaboration helps foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. This culture will extend beyond the traditional red and blue teams to any cybersecurity initiative. With purple teaming, the collaborative nature of the exercise empowers both teams to work together towards a common goal: enhancing the organization's cybersecurity defenses.

Purple Team Best Practices

In order to ensure the effectiveness of purple teaming and maximize its impact on cybersecurity exercises, organizations should consider adopting the following best practices:

Choose the Right Team Members

Selecting the right individuals for teaming exercises is crucial to their effectiveness. Ideally, team members should possess strong technical skills in both offensive and defensive cybersecurity techniques. Red team members should be experienced penetration testers with expertise in simulating real-world attack scenarios. Blue team members should have a deep understanding of the organization's security infrastructure, threat detection capabilities, and incident response procedures.

Most importantly, choose team members who exhibit a collaborative mindset and a willingness to work together towards a common goal. Effective communication skills are paramount, as team members will need to convey their findings, insights, and recommended improvements to one another clearly.

Identify the End Goal

Before beginning the purple teaming exercise, clearly define the goals and objectives to ensure alignment with the organization's security priorities. Identifying the end goal helps guide the red team's attack simulations, the blue team's areas of defense, and the types of insights shared during purple teaming.

For instance, the end goal could be to evaluate the organization's resilience against advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting critical infrastructure. With this goal in mind, the red team can tailor their attack scenarios to emulate sophisticated APT tactics, while the blue team concentrates on fortifying critical systems and implementing enhanced threat detection mechanisms. Then, as a combined purple team, the two groups share insights most relevant to how the organization’s critical infrastructure holds up against APTs. 

Don't Compete, Collaborate

Despite the elements of gamification, it’s important to remember that teaming exercises aren’t a game. Successful purple teaming requires fostering a collaborative environment rather than adversarial competition between the red and blue teams. The focus shouldn’t be on winning the exercise but on collectively learning from each other and understanding the organization’s security weak spots. 

The teams should work together, sharing knowledge, insights, and techniques with the common objective of improving the organization's overall cybersecurity posture. A collaborative approach creates a positive feedback loop, where the red team adapts their attack techniques based on the blue team's improvements, leading to a continuously evolving defense.

Report Your Findings

Thoroughly documenting and reporting the findings from the purple team exercise is essential for driving targeted improvements in the organization's cybersecurity defenses. The insights gained during the exercise should be captured in a detailed report, including the red team's attack methodologies, the blue team's response strategies, and insights gleaned during purple teaming.

The report should highlight areas of strength and weakness, provide actionable recommendations for improvement, and outline a roadmap for enhancing the organization's cyber resilience.

Go Beyond Teaming Exercises 

Teaming exercises are made significantly more effective when organizations have the tools to test their defenses against realistic attack scenarios, the means to objectively understand their performance, and the expertise to continuously enhance their cybersecurity posture. 

At SimSpace, we provide a comprehensive suite of advanced simulation platforms and professional services enabling organizations to conduct immersive live-fire exercises meaningfully enhance their cyber readiness.  

With our military-grade Cyber Force Platform, organizations can simulate real-world cyber attacks. Our Cyber Score provides forensic-level analysis needed to assess their strengths and weaknesses accurately. And combined with the expertise of our cybersecurity professionals, organizations gain valuable guidance to identify areas for improvement and implement effective strategies to bolster their defense capabilities.

Request a demo today to level up your teaming experiences and enhance your cybersecurity.