Purple Teaming

What is Purple Teaming?

Purple teaming is a collaborative security exercise model in which offensive security (red team) and defensive security (blue team) practitioners work together — rather than in opposition — to improve an organization's detection and response capabilities. In a traditional red team engagement, the red team operates covertly while the blue team attempts to detect them, with a debrief at the end. In purple teaming, both teams collaborate in real time: the red team executes specific adversary techniques while the blue team validates whether their detection tools and monitoring produce the expected alerts, then immediately tunes detections where gaps are found.

Description

The purple team model emerged from a practical frustration with traditional red team exercises: organizations spent significant budget on red team engagements and received reports documenting attack chains, but without the blue team's active participation in the exercise, detection engineering improvements were slow, imprecise, and decoupled from the actual attack techniques tested. Purple teaming solves this by making detection improvement the explicit, collaborative goal of the exercise. A typical purple team session proceeds through MITRE ATT&CK technique by technique: the red team executes the technique; the blue team confirms whether it generated an alert; if not, the teams work together to understand why — wrong telemetry source, incorrect rule logic, tool misconfiguration — and fix it immediately. This creates a tight feedback loop between offensive technique execution and defensive coverage improvement. Purple teaming also accelerates detection engineering velocity: instead of waiting for the next red team engagement to test new detection rules, purple team sessions provide a structured forum for continuous detection validation. threat intelligence informs purple team exercise design: sessions focused on the TTPs of threat groups most likely to target the organization provide the highest return on detection engineering investment. The ATT&CK maturity assessment video from Evolve Security demonstrates how ATT&CK framework coverage is measured and improved through exercises like purple teaming.

Usage and Examples

A financial services organization schedules a series of four purple team sessions over six months, each focused on a specific ATT&CK tactic: initial access (phishing and adversary-in-the-middle attacks), credential access, lateral movement, and exfiltration. In the first session, the red team executes 12 credential access techniques. The blue team detects 5 of 12 reliably, partially detects 3, and has no coverage for 4. By the end of the day, the teams have tuned existing detections and created 3 new detection rules for the previously uncovered techniques. A 6-week follow-up session validates that the new detections work correctly under realistic conditions. Over six months, the organization's MITRE ATT&CK coverage improves from 42% to 78% — with measurable improvement tied to specific exercise outcomes.

How Does This Relate to Penetration Testing?

Purple teaming is an advanced capability that builds on the foundation of traditional penetration testing. Organizations new to offensive security should typically complete network and application penetration testing first to address known vulnerabilities — then advance to red team exercises, and then to collaborative purple team programs to maximize detection engineering improvements. Evolve Security's red team practitioners bring the adversary tradecraft expertise that makes purple team sessions realistic and intelligence-driven, while advisory services support blue team capability development and ATT&CK coverage roadmapping. Evolve Security's Red Team and Advisory services support purple team programs — from planning ATT&CK-aligned exercise scenarios to executing realistic technique simulations and measuring detection coverage improvements.