Red team, blue team, and purple team exercises are innovative security strategies that simulate real-life cyber attacks to locate weaknesses, improve information security, and maximize the effectiveness of defenses.
Red Team vs Blue Team vs Purple Team: Differences Explained
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Red, blue and purple teams simulate cyberattacks and incident responses to test an organization’s cybersecurity readiness.
- Blue teams defend an organization from attacks and simulate incident response teams by following company policies and using existing resources
- Red teams simulate or actually conduct pentesting and threat hunting attacks to test the effectiveness of an organization’s security — sometimes including physical security, social engineering, and other non-IT-related methods
- Purple teams blend both roles as a mixed team or as a team that simply facilitates collaboration and communication between the blue and red teams
Understanding how these teams operate is important for an organization that wants to test its cybersecurity defenses realistically — before an adversary does. The ultimate goal is to understand the advanced threats an organization may face in order to better protect against those adversaries.
Table of Contents
Blue Teams
Blue teams simulate day-to-day operations that protect an organization’s systems and networks from cyberattacks. They monitor systems for signs of suspicious activity, investigate alerts, scan for indicators of compromise (IoCs), and respond to recognized incidents.
Blue team members might be led by a chief information security officer (CISO) or director of security operations, making this team the largest among the three. Blue teams tend to be larger because they must prevent all attacks, while red teams may simply select a few specific attacks to pursue. Blue teams consist of security analysts, network engineers and system administrators. The team may be divided into sub-teams depending on the type of security controls it is responsible for, such as network security, endpoint security, or the security operations center (SOC).
Red Teams
Red teams simulate the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) an adversary might use against the organization. A red team’s activity can extend beyond cybersecurity attacks and vulnerability scanning to include phishing, social engineering, and physical compromise campaigns lasting weeks or more.
The red team literally tests the effectiveness of the organization’s defensive measures — often without warning. The red team will use cyberattack tactics such as reconnaissance, malware deployment, vulnerability exploitation, phishing attacks, and command and control servers to conduct an advanced attack. Red teams use intelligence on new and emerging threats as well as previous research on new attack techniques and offensive security tools.
The red team is a smaller group compared to the blue team and it may include a few members such as ethical hackers, locksmiths, programmers, and social engineers. These members may be led by a director of penetration testing or a senior security consultant and be organized in sub-teams based on the type of testing they are performing.
Red team members tend to be recruited from the outside so that they have the true perspective of external adversaries. The red team will report their attempted attack methods to compare against alerts generated by security tools for gaps in configurations and overlooked issues. Any successful attack findings will be reviewed to identify vulnerabilities and technology gaps to be addressed.
The Ballads of the Blue and Red Team
Team Blue
- Defends against both real attackers and red teams
- Proactively protect the organization against cyber-attacks
- Maintain a constant vigilance over the security posture
- Adjust security posture based on insights from the red team and SOC
- Continuously improve detection and response
The role of the Blue Team is to defend the organization against threats in the wild and improve the organization’s defenses. The Blue Team promptly detects threats and responds according to their security policies. Along with detection and remediation, they must keep up with new threat intelligence and prioritize mitigation actions against such threats. Therefore, blue Teams focus more on tools that enable them to perform their job efficiently, such as SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response)and SIEM (Security information and event management) tools.
Team Red
- Have to think like a hacker
- Test the effectiveness of the organization’s security program.
- Emulate the tools, techniques, and processes used by likely adversaries.
- Runs tests over a prolonged period to find vulnerabilities.
- Provide a complete audit of testing results.
The role of the Red Team is to identify the gaps in the organization in an authorized manner. They perform regular Penetration Testing to determine how secure the systems are and what are the vulnerabilities or misconfigurations present in the system. They try to evade the detections developed by the blue team and point out the gaps so that the defenders can fix them. Some of the tools used are C2 Frameworks such as Metasploit , social engineering frameworks such as Social Engineering Toolkit (SET), and asset discovery tools such as Amass , Shodan , etc.
Building a Closed-Loop Network with Purple Teaming
Make no mistakes, the role of both blue and red teams is to prevent breaches in the organization and improve the organization’s security posture.
Therefore, it is essential to have a coordinated effort between both groups and tackle new security challenges effectively.
- Both teams must join hands to ensure a complete audit of every assessment and the analytics attached to it.
- Red teams will provide detailed logs of all the assessments performed, and blue teams will religiously address all the corrective detections and mitigations required to address the issues found during testing
This is where Purple Teaming comes in.
Red Team + Blue Team = Purple Teaming
Understanding the perspective of the blue and red teams is crucial to comprehending how purple team exercises can improve the security posture. Unfortunately, even though they serve one purpose, they inevitably clash without active oversight.
From the standpoint of a blue team, minimal alerts indicate that security controls are running in optimal condition, effectively preventing threats. Similarly, when numerous alerts begin to rise, it also means that the implemented detection controls are working. Thus, there is no motivation for the blue team to help the red team as the red team’s failures equate to the blue team’s success.
From a red team’s stance, a report containing multiple findings is a job well done. The number of bypassed controls measures success for red team operators. But, again, it leads to zero incentive to help the blue team because as the blue team fails, the more it equates to the success of the red team.
A Purple team exists to prepare red and blue teams and promote intel sharing.
Purple Teaming is a methodology and not a team inside the organization. Purple teaming aims to make the Red and Blue teams work in a Continuous Feedback and Knowledge Transfer model to maximize the organization’s cyber capabilities.
The purpose of the Red Team is to improve the Blue Team, but this can fail if there is no continuous interaction between both teams. There needs to be shared information, management, and metrics so that the blue team can prioritize their goals. By being a part of an attack, blue teams understand the attacker’s methodology, making them more effective in employing existing software to prevent threats. In the same manner, understanding the defense and the mindset allows the Red Team to be more creative and find niche vulnerabilities unique to the organization.
