What is Purple Teaming?
Purple teaming is a collaborative cybersecurity exercise that combines the best aspects of red teaming and blue teaming approaches. Unlike traditional red teaming where the red team acts independently, purple teaming involves a more collaborative effort. The red team and the blue team (the organisation’s security team) work together throughout the exercise, sharing information, insights, and strategies. This fosters better communication and knowledge transfer, leading to a more comprehensive security assessment.
Why purple teaming?
Purple teaming offers several advantages over separate red and blue teaming exercises:
- Improved communication: By working together throughout the exercise, the red and blue teams can improve communication and collaboration, which is crucial for effective incident response.
- Enhanced threat detection: Sharing insights and threat intelligence allows both teams to identify and respond to potential threats more effectively.
- Realistic attack scenarios: Purple teaming exercises can simulate more realistic attack scenarios, as the red team can adapt their tactics based on the blue team’s responses.
- Continuous improvement: The collaborative nature of purple teaming fosters continuous learning and improvement for both the red and blue teams, leading to a more robust security posture over time.
The Purple Teaming Process
A purple teaming exercise typically follows a structured approach that incorporates elements from both red and blue teaming:
- Planning and scoping: Define the objectives, scope, and limitations of the purple teaming exercise, ensuring alignment with the organisation’s security concerns.
- Intelligence sharing: Both the red and blue teams share relevant threat intelligence to create a realistic attack scenario.
- Collaborative attack simulation: The red team launches a simulated attack, while the blue team actively defends the network, with both teams continuously sharing information and adapting their strategies.
- Joint analysis: After the simulation, both teams analyse the results, identifying successful attack vectors, defensive gaps, and areas for improvement.
- Remediation and improvement: Based on the findings, the organisation implements corrective actions to address vulnerabilities and strengthen their security posture.
Benefits of Purple Teaming
- More comprehensive assessments: Purple teaming provides a more holistic view of an organisation’s security posture by combining offensive and defensive perspectives.
- Enhanced team collaboration: Fosters closer collaboration between the security team and potential attackers (ethical hackers), leading to improved communication and incident response.
- Continuous learning: The iterative nature of purple teaming encourages continuous learning and improvement for both red and blue teams.
- Proactive threat hunting: By simulating real-world attacks, purple teaming helps organisations develop a proactive approach to threat hunting, making them more prepared for actual threats.
Microsoft doesn’t offer a dedicated “purple teaming” service, but its security solutions and services can facilitate a purple teaming approach:
- Microsoft Azure Sentinel: A cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tool that can be used to collect and analyse security data from both red and blue teams during the exercise.
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint: Provides advanced threat protection capabilities that can be used by the red team to simulate attacker behaviour, and by the blue team for threat detection.
- Microsoft Consulting Services: Security consultants can guide the planning, execution, and analysis of purple teaming exercises.
Purple teaming represents a forward-thinking approach to cybersecurity assessments. By bridging the gap between red and blue teams, purple teaming fosters collaboration, knowledge transfer, and continuous improvement, ultimately leading to a more robust and resilient security posture for organisations.
