Increasingly, organisations are investing in security teams with specialised skills that simulate a defensive strategy to preempt and proactively address potential cyber-attacks and data breaches. As part of this threat-driven approach to resilience, red teams launch internal campaigns, such as continuous penetration testing, vulnerability exploitation, and attack simulation exercises, that replicate an attacker’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP).  

What do blue teams do? 

Alternatively to red teams, blue teams are responsible for continuous and specialised defensive responses. They anticipate the threats and exploits from the red team and detect, analyse and respond to new and ongoing cyber risks through threat intelligence, continuous monitoring and network detection data.  

Continuously coordinating the activities of both teams ensures that the blue team can ingest the red team's output, update the organisation's response capability, and add to overall cyber resilience. Instead of creating a specific 'purple team' with extra personnel, it is best to create a function that includes red and blue team members so that simulation exercises and response initiatives can feed into a continuous threat lifecycle.

What is purple teaming?

Purple teaming is a security function that integrates the “attack” operations of a ‘red team’ with the “defend” operations of a ‘blue team’ in advanced and dynamic training experiences. 

To learn more about how purple teaming can add to your organisation's security posture, check out how Sygnia applies a hands-on, gloves-off approach to adversarial security and assign teams with several decades of cumulative cyber experience to a client's mission.