Purple Teaming: How It Works, Core Roles and Key Benefits

Purple teaming is a collaborative security exercise in which offensive testers (the red team) and your own defenders (the blue team) work together openly to run real attack techniques, check what gets detected and fix what doesn’t. Instead of a covert attack and a report weeks later, both sides share results as they happen.

In our engagements, our penetration testers form the red team. Your security analysts and engineers form the blue team, using the monitoring and playbooks you already have. Purple teaming sits alongside our other penetration testing services.

How purple teaming works

A purple team exercise runs as a loop: attack, check, fix, repeat.

• Real-time collaboration: Testers and defenders work in the same room or call, not in separate tracks. Everyone knows which technique is being run and when.
• Feedback loop: A tester runs one technique, then asks your defenders straight away whether an alert fired and whether it reached the right person. The answer is recorded before moving on.
• Fix and re-run: When a technique goes unnoticed, the team works out why, for example logging that’s switched off or a missing detection rule. Your defenders adjust the configuration, and the tester re-runs the attack to confirm the fix.

Core roles in a purple team exercise

Three roles shape a purple team exercise.

• Red team: Ethical hackers who simulate a real adversary’s tactics and techniques. This is our side, drawing on the skills behind our red teaming engagements.
• Blue team: Your own defenders, meaning the analysts, engineers and anyone who responds to alerts. They work with your existing monitoring, such as SIEM and EDR tools, and your response playbooks.
• Purple team: The shared function that connects both sides. It keeps the list of techniques to test, records results and tracks agreed fixes. Planning the exercise can be part of our cybersecurity consulting.

Key benefits of purple teaming

• Faster detection: Many gaps can be fixed and the attack re-run during the exercise, rather than waiting for a written report to work its way through a backlog.
• Framework alignment: Exercises are usually mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, which describes itself as “a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.” Mapping results shows which techniques you detect and where coverage is thin.
• Better use of existing tools: Detection gaps often come from configuration rather than missing products. Tuning the logging, rules and alerts you already own catches more attacks and cuts false alarms.

Purple teaming vs red teaming and a pentest, and what it costs

A pentest, a red team and a purple team answer different questions, and they’re priced differently.

• Penetration test: Which weaknesses in your systems can be exploited? Our guide to the types of penetration testing explains the options.
• Red team: Can your defenders stop a covert, goal-driven attack? Red teaming starts from $15,000 and typically takes 15 to 30+ tester-days.
• Purple team: How well do you detect specific techniques? It’s open collaboration that tunes detection step by step.

A common order is a pentest first, then a red team exercise or purple teaming to test detection. Our comparison of red team vs penetration testing covers that choice.

In one red team exercise, we’ve seen several direct attempts blocked, yet a less obvious combination of misconfiguration, excessive permissions and trust between systems still formed an attack path. No single element looked critical on its own. Afterwards, the client also focused on limiting lateral movement. Walking through techniques one by one with your defenders is how a purple team exercise brings chains like this into view.

Purple teaming is quoted individually in tester-days after a scoping call. The price is fixed for the agreed scope and confirmed in writing before testing. See our penetration testing pricing for other tests.

Sources: MITRE ATT&CK.