Getting Familiar With Purple Team in Cyber Security

There have been increasing amounts of organizations worldwide that see immense value in conducting Red Team/ Blue Team cybersecurity exercises. 

However, not many of those organizations know about the possibility of having a Purple team in cyber security to mediate processes between red and blue teams, encourage collaboration, and set processes for continuous feedback to enhance their cyber resilience. 

In this article, we will tell you everything you need to know about the Purple team in cyber security, the activities they implement into security processes, and the benefits they bring to an organization. 

What Is a Purple Team in Cyber Security?

Purple teaming in cybersecurity is a collaborative approach where the attacking and defending teams come together to share their experiences with each other and improve an organization’s security posture as a result. 

Generally, this process involves uniting Red Teams (offensive security specialists) and Blue Teams (group of defenders) with the clear goal in mind – to improve their cyber capabilities through knowledge sharing and feedback. 

This way, both of the team members help each other out to identify weaknesses within an organization to improve processes and security protocols, as well as create an actionable plan of taking your cybersecurity efforts to the next level. 

Why Are Purple Teams Important?

The purple team concept acts as a mediator between the two essential parts of an organization’s security process – red and blue teams. 

With this initiative, management encourages collaboration and security control validation to bridge the gap and build proper security processes that are hard to break into by identifying focus areas that would benefit from further investigation and improvements. 

Besides, this initiative enhances the efforts you put into improving your organization’s cyber preparedness management and gives your employees abilities to prevent, mitigate, and recover from ever evolving cyber threats and attacks. 

Benefits of Purple Teaming

There are several benefits that purple teaming gives to organizations. This practice has proved to be beneficial on both individual and organizational levels. 

Let’s have a look at some of the most prominent benefits that purple teaming offers: 

Thanks to different realistic simulations and cybersecurity exercises, purple teaming practice allows organizations to discover vulnerabilities and detect areas of improvement. 

After finding those vulnerabilities, it is important that teams create proper reports about those vulnerabilities for management so they know where to invest their resources to see effective results. 

Productive collaboration and actionable feedback drive teams to assess their incident response capabilities and improve their processes to better detect and respond to potential cyber threats and attacks. 

This way, the whole team is aware of common and up-to-date security practices, improving an organization’s overall security posture. 

Generally, organizations that conduct purple team exercises regularly have a better understanding of how to tackle cyber challenges when the threats occur. 

Statistics show how cyber attacks get increasingly sophisticated every time. Regular cyber exercises and collaborative activities help team members understand the new practices and be prepared at all times. 

In its essence, purple teaming encourages constant collaboration and communication between teams, leading them to understanding cybersecurity challenges better and improving skills to identify threats. 

It’s all about knowledge sharing here between the Red and Blue team members, which helps them boost their collaboration skills as well. 

Conducting exercises with the purple team approach helps organizations meet local regulatory compliance requirements, too. This way, they will avoid fines and penalties while improving their overall security posture. 

Purple Team in Cyber Security: Exercises and Activities

The primary objective of purple teaming is to bring Red and Blue teams together and facilitate collaboration with each other and enhance organizational cyber resilience. So, all of the activities planned within this framework are aligned with this idea of continuous knowledge sharing and feedback. 

Let’s have a look at some of the examples of the exercises and activities that Purple Teaming is bringing to the organization: 

Launching Cyber Attacks Against Critical Systems

Generally, Purple teams provide different attack scenarios to Red teams to execute the offense and Blue teams to come up with the plan and defend against them. 

For that, they need to conduct discussion sessions and create analyses to assess both of the team’s effectiveness throughout the process. As a result, teams get suggestions on what to improve on a collaborative level. 

Performing Audits

The purple teaming approach also helps organizations perform secondary audits and understand the current state of their networks and systems. The main idea here is to set an effective process to check the team’s progress in improving their cybersecurity skills and abilities to prevent attacks. 

Identifying Security Vulnerabilities

This process involves responsible teams executing risk assessments and facilitating discussions to understand vulnerabilities and potential risks and identify priorities for making future improvements. 

It is important to properly understand what are the root causes of simulated breaches. What were the misconfigurations or human errors that played a role in this simulation? 

Aligning Policies

After the activities and exercises, it is important to align security policies and procedures based on the performance of your teams. 

This way, you make sure that teams are involved in the alignment process and that the set policies are actually the ones that the organization needs. Team’s input can help you identify inconsistencies and target them with policy improvements as a result. 

Creating Continuous Feedback Loop

Finally, the collaboration that Purple teaming brings creates a feedback loop between the Red and Blue teams, which only benefits the organization in the long run. They can organize regular meetings to share insights, discuss potential threats, and identify enhancements in the current security processes. 

Red Team vs Blue Team vs Purple Team

Let’s take a look at the individual overview of Red and Blue teams in cybersecurity, and then compare them to the mediator, Purple team. 

• Red team – the role of this team is to simulate high-level cyber attacks using real-world techniques to get into defender’s systems. Mostly composed of offensive security experts, their goal is to expose weaknesses of an organization they are “attacking.”
• Blue team – this team aims to monitor the network activities and use different security controls to detect suspicious activities and protect the organization’s digital assets. Their knowledge and expertise in incident response and threat detection.
• Purple team – they act as a mediator between the Red and Blue teams. Their responsibility is to bridge gaps between them and improve the organization’s cyber resilience by creating an environment for collaboration and feedback sharing. 

Conclusion

Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly challenging for organizations in the modern world. Therefore, fostering the collaboration and knowledge sharing between the teams is necessary to always be up-to-date with the policies and ensure the high level preparedness of your organization. 

At CybExer, we have been at the forefront of shaping the cybersecurity industry since 2016. We are committed to providing organizations worldwide with advanced hands-on cybersecurity training solutions, assisting them to improve their security posture through Purple teaming capabilities that our platform offers.  We offer a wide range of advanced training modules, helping you to enhance your team’s cyber capabilities. If you’d like to learn more about our offering, schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.