What is a Purple Team?
A Purple Team is a way of working in which the Red Team (attackers) and the Blue Team (defenders) collaborate to improve an organisation’s cyber resilience.
Instead of working separately, both teams share knowledge and insights to learn faster, improve detection rules and raise the overall level of security.
🧠 What does a Purple Team do?
A Purple Team:
- Acts as a bridge between the Red and Blue Teams
- Lets attackers (Red) carry out their techniques while defenders (Blue) learn, monitor and respond in real time
- Provides direct feedback on what works and what doesn’t
- Tests, improves and documents the effectiveness of detection and response measures
🔄 How does it work?
- The Red Team executes an attack (e.g. Phishing, privilege escalation, lateral movement)
- The Blue Team tries to detect it with tools such as SIEM, EDR and SOAR
- Both teams evaluate together:
- Was it spotted?
- How was it handled?
- Which log sources were useful?
- What can be improved?
- New detection rules, alerts or playbooks are added
📈 Aims of a Purple Team
- Improve detection quality and speed
- Build knowledge between Red and Blue
- Improve incident response processes
- Create realistic exercise scenarios
- Reduce blind spots in infrastructure and monitoring
🧰 Tools and techniques
- MITRE ATT&CK for mapping techniques
- SIEM, EDR and SOAR for log analysis and automation
- Threat simulation tools (e.g. Atomic Red Team, Caldera, AttackIQ)
- Threat Hunting and alert tuning
- Feedback cycles within the SOC
✅ Benefits of a Purple Team approach
| Benefit | Impact |
|---|---|
| Direct knowledge transfer | Faster learning and improvement |
| Fewer silos between teams | Better cooperation and communication |
| Measurable improvement | Lead times and detection gaps become visible |
| Continuous improvement | Security becomes an iterative process |
🆚 Red, Blue and Purple Team
| Team | Purpose | Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Red Team | Simulating attacks | Offensive |
| Blue Team | Defending and responding | Defensive |
| Purple Team | Learning from both attack and defence | Collaborative and iterative |
📌 In summary
A Purple Team is not a third team, but a cooperative process between attackers (Red) and defenders (Blue) to test, strengthen and rapidly improve security measures.