Purple Teams: What Are They and What Do They Do?

Every day, cyber security is growing, and new threats are appearing. Organizations need to create security teams that are responsible for the organization’s security to mitigate and safeguard the organization against attacks.

When it comes to cyber security, there are two general sorts of teams from which to choose. In terms of security, these teams are responsible for both defensive and offensive strategies, which means they are responsible for executing attack simulations and remediating any vulnerabilities discovered during the simulations. Let’s take a quick look at what they are.

A red team is made up of security professionals who take an aggressive stance to secure the system in the most effective way possible. They deploy a variety of free and paid tools to identify and remediate weaknesses in both the systems and employees. They act like hackers attempting to get illegal access to the assets of the organization. Afterward, they describe their results and give recommendations on mitigating the vulnerabilities they have discovered.

They carry out various types of simulated attacks on the company, like phishing, penetration testing, and so on, in order to assess its overall security.

Taking on the role of the company’s defense mechanism, the blue team comprises security professionals who take a defensive approach to security to protect the company’s assets. They are well aware of the company objectives and the security procedures that have been put in place.

Blue teams work constantly to make the organization’s security approaches stronger to make them more secure. They carry out risk assessments on various assets, resulting in the creation of various policies within the firm, implemented to keep it safe. They carry out a variety of exercises, such as verifying firewall controls and establishing IDS and IPS systems, among others.

Purple Teams: Why Is This Approach Needed?

The fact that there are two different teams in cyber security means one takes an offensive approach to the problem and the other a defensive one. Sometimes, the teams are unable to collaborate with one another and share information, which might leave an organization open to attacks on various levels. For example, the red team may not completely divulge the tactics or tools they used to enter the computer networks.

As a result, teams that can function as both red and blue teams and share information with one another are required to increase the overall security of the business. This gives rise to the necessity for purple teams, whose security members can collaborate to improve security expertise, increase performance, and participate in a purple team simulation.

Purple teams also streamline security enhancements. They are well-versed in the secrets of the red team and the offensive approaches of the blue team, allowing them to execute security functions within the corporation with relative ease.

What Do Purple Teams Do?

When testing the company’s resources, purple team members provide a more realistic, deeper, and stronger security check of the organization’s resources since they are aware of the threats and mitigations put in place by the organization.

Since they follow the red team approach, they use offensive methods for infiltration. Once they have completed the infiltration, they move on to the defensive approach. They patch the vulnerabilities on the system they infiltrated, preventing others from using the vulnerability in the future.

Purple teams use a variety of approaches to mitigate threats and vulnerabilities, including threat modeling, TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures), deploying defense systems, adding new rules to firewalls, or deploying new firewalls or IDSs, to detect attacks ASAP. They also perform exercises on the employees, basically purple team simulations, so that employees can learn to recognize phishing and other social engineering attacks.

The purple team has complete knowledge of the attack that has been carried out, including what lapses caused the attack to occur. This allows the organization to fix these lapses and further put mitigation measures in place. Thus, future attacks can be avoided. This is extremely beneficial to the organization’s overall performance.

In Summary

As we have several sorts of cyber security teams, each of which uses its own methodologies and technologies, an organization’s needs can suffer from improper collaboration from time to time, particularly in the early stages of the project. For example, the red team identifies vulnerabilities in the entire organization without disclosing how they discovered the vulnerabilities. They believe that the blue team will be able to add defensive mechanisms. However, because the blue team lacks sufficient information, they are unable to place the defenses properly.

Such a lack of understanding of the other team’s work makes purple teams extremely important in the organization. Purple teams catalyze the collaborative efforts of the red and blue teams.