Understanding your adversaries is a critical element of your cybersecurity strategy. In order to do that, you need to understand the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) they use to overcome your defences and search for vulnerabilities. A purple team leverages intelligence about the TTPs used by threat actors to build a test plan that enables an organisation to conduct deep and thorough cyber attack simulations that mimic real world scenarios.
Blue teaming vs Red teaming
Purple teaming is a merger of red teams that are typically engaged to conduct simulated attacks, and blue teams that try to repel the red team’s attack. Usually, when doing a purple team exercise (red teaming vs blue teaming), the designers of the activity simulate the threat actor based on information provided by threat intelligence teams. The defensive, or blue team, can then tailor its defensive tactics. This is different to a red team exercise where the defensive team is rarely aware that a simulated attack is taking place. The red and blue teams work alongside each other.
A purple teams engagement is a powerful tool to check the detection and response in place, as well as to identify blind spots and solve them at execution and testing time. See our resources section to learn more about what is purple teaming?
