What is Purple Teaming?

The traditional cybersecurity model separates red teams and blue teams into distinct, siloed roles, red teams identify vulnerabilities through simulated attacks, while blue teams work independently to defend and respond. While this approach has had value in the past, it’s outdated and leads to a disjointed process: red teams uncover vulnerabilities, but blue teams don’t always have full visibility into how those weaknesses were exploited, and vice versa. Without real collaboration, organizations are left with slow feedback loops, patchwork fixes, and missed opportunities to improve.

Purple teaming improves the old model by bringing both sides together. Red and blue teams work in unison, sharing insights, testing defenses, and learning from each engagement in real-time. And the results speak for themselves. A CyberRisk Alliance and Plextrac survey found that 88% of organizations that adopted purple teaming saw meaningful improvements in their cybersecurity defenses. When offense and defense move as one, security gets stronger across the board.

Before any testing begins, the Purple Team lays the groundwork. This phase is focused on setting clear, measurable goals and aligning all stakeholders on the purpose, scope, and limitations of the engagement. Without a well-defined plan, the exercise risks producing limited or misleading results.

Identify Objectives: This is the initial step where the Purple Team defines what they aim to achieve. Objectives may include improving detection rates, reducing breach impact, or enhancing response times.
Define Scope: With clear objectives, the team sets the scope of the exercise, outlining which systems, networks, and assets will be included in the testing.
Establish Rules: To maintain order and ensure no actual harm comes to the organization’s assets, rules of engagement are put in place. These rules determine how aggressive the Red Team can be and what actions the Blue Team will take in response.

Once the groundwork is set, the Red Team initiates simulated attacks. These operations are designed to mimic real-world threat actors, exposing gaps in the organization’s defenses. The goal isn’t just to break in, but to provide actionable intelligence on how an adversary might exploit the environment.

Investigate: The Red Team begins by gathering information on the target, and identifying potential entry points and weaknesses that could be exploited.
Attack Simulations (Sims): Using the data collected, the Red Team launches controlled cyber attacks against the organization, employing tactics and techniques reflective of real-world adversaries.
Vulnerability ID: Throughout the offensive operations, the Red Team identifies and documents vulnerabilities, which will later be addressed by the Blue Team.

As the attacks unfold, the Blue Team works to detect, respond to, and contain threats in real-time. This phase tests the effectiveness of existing security tools, processes, and team coordination under pressure, simulating the demands of a real incident.

Detection: The Blue Team uses various tools and strategies to detect the simulated attacks in real-time, aiming to identify and intercept the Red Team’s maneuvers.
Incident Response (IR): In response to detected threats, the Blue Team executes incident response protocols to contain and mitigate the impact of the attacks.
Remediation: Post-incident, the Blue Team works on addressing the identified vulnerabilities, patching up security holes, and strengthening the system against similar future attacks.

With both teams’ input, the final phase is dedicated to extracting insights from the exercise. This is where lessons are captured, improvements are implemented, and the organization’s security posture evolves based on real, hands-on data.

Improve: Leveraging the insights from the analysis, the organization updates its security protocols, tools, and training to improve its defenses.
Analyze: The improved strategies are then analyzed for effectiveness, ensuring that each iteration of the Purple Teaming process results in a tangible enhancement of security measures.

Foundational Aspects of Purple Teaming

Purple teaming emerged as a natural evolution of red teaming and blue teaming methodologies. Red teaming traditionally focused on simulating real-world attacks to expose vulnerabilities, while blue teaming emphasized defensive measures to detect and respond to threats. However, these approaches often operated in silos lacking a cohesive collaboration, purple teaming bridges this gap by uniting offensive and defensive teams in a coordinated effort, built on several foundational principles.

The Role of Collaboration

At its core lies collaboration, by working together red teams and blue teams can leverage their respective expertise, knowledge, and insights. Red teams bring their offensive mindset emulating sophisticated attackers and uncovering vulnerabilities, while blue teams bring their defensive expertise analyzing and improving existing security controls. This collaboration enables a comprehensive assessment of an organization’s security defenses.

Aligned Objectives

Purple teaming aligns the objectives of red teams and blue teams ensuring they work towards a common goal, the focus is not solely on finding vulnerabilities but also on refining defensive measures to mitigate those vulnerabilities effectively. This alignment fosters a shared understanding of the organization’s risk landscape, enhances communication, and promotes a unified approach to addressing security gaps.

Knowledge Sharing

Purple teaming creates an environment that encourages knowledge sharing and skill development, red teams and blue teams learn from each other gaining insights into the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers as well as effective defensive strategies. This cross-pollination of expertise fosters continuous learning and empowers individuals to improve their skills in both offensive and defensive cybersecurity practices.

By combining these foundational aspects, purple teaming transforms isolated security functions into a cohesive, adaptive defense strategy. It eliminates the gaps caused by siloed efforts, enabling teams to learn in real-time, respond more effectively, and build resilience into the organization’s security posture.

The Benefits of Purple Teaming

As supported by the statistic highlighted at the beginning of this article, Purple Teaming delivers measurable security improvements that directly reduce risk. Among others, there are four core outcomes organizations can expect from implementing this approach:

Fewer Undetected Vulnerabilities – Purple Teaming exposes security gaps that traditional assessments miss by simulating real-world attacker behavior in live environments. This leads to faster identification of exploitable weaknesses and earlier remediation before attackers can take advantage.
Stronger and More Accurate Defenses – Security controls improve rapidly when detection rules, SIEM configurations, and response protocols are tested against real offensive tactics. Purple Teaming provides the validation needed to fine-tune defenses and eliminate false positives, making your tools more reliable in high-stakes scenarios.
Faster Threat Detection and Response Times – When offensive and defensive strategies are tested together, detection becomes faster and response actions more precise. You can expect reductions in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) as a result of these integrated exercises.
Continuous Security Maturity Gains – Each exercise provides actionable data that improves the next, creating a cycle of constant refinement. This leads to cumulative gains in visibility, preparedness, and control effectiveness, measurable over time through reduced incident impact and improved audit outcomes.

Together, these outcomes make Purple Teaming a strategic force multiplier. Instead of relying on isolated red team findings or passive defensive tuning, organizations using this model actively strengthen their entire security program, reducing risk faster and building resilience that lasts.

Integrating Purple Teaming Into Our Managed SIEM Offering

At TrollEye Security, Purple Teaming isn’t a standalone engagement, it’s embedded directly into our Managed SIEM offering to deliver continuous, measurable security improvements. While most SIEM solutions focus solely on log aggregation and alerting, ours goes further by validating detection rules, identifying coverage gaps, and ensuring real-world attack scenarios are actively tested and tuned against your environment.

Download Why SIEM Should Include Purple Teaming

Learn why SIEM should include purple teaming, and how your security team can remediate more vulnerabilities and stop more breaches by combining them.

By integrating Purple Teaming into our Managed SIEM service, we create a closed-loop system where offensive simulations inform defensive configurations and incident response actions are tested and refined regularly. This approach ensures your SIEM isn’t just a passive alerting tool, it becomes an adaptive security platform, continuously learning and evolving based on active adversary emulation and response feedback.

The result is a smarter, faster, and more effective security operation, built around real collaboration and continuous validation.

What is Purple Teaming?