How To Build a Formidable Purple Team Security Strategy

In the past, red and blue cybersecurity teams provided basic protection for businesses. Today, with evolving threats and frequent data breaches, purple team security prioritizes collaborative solutions to strengthen defenses.

For IT and security engineers looking to build a more robust offensive and defensive cybersecurity strategy, you might be ready to combine the red and blue teams into the concept of a purple team.

Decades ago, an offensive (red team) and defensive (blue team) team were enough to protect your business from the occasional email phishing campaign or a physical attacker breaking into a facility after hours. As threat vectors evolve, organized cybercrime becomes more sophisticated, and the frequency of data breaches increases, the concept of purple team security focuses on innovative collaboration to strengthen your defenses.

Let’s dive into the different dynamics of cybersecurity teams, discuss the rise of purple teaming, and explain how to build a dynamic, modern security force.

Understanding the Dynamics of Cybersecurity Teams

Cybersecurity teams use different tools and methodologies to protect a business proactively and retroactively. Each team has unique roles, responsibilities, skills, certifications, and more.

Blue Team: The Defenders

The blue team is your defensive player for your IT infrastructure. Their main goal is to provide security monitoring and detection across different systems, networks and applications. When a cyber incident occurs, they’re the first responders to investigate and mitigate damages quickly. Job titles could include security analysts, security engineers, incident response analysts, risk analysts, and more.

Red Team: The Attackers

The red team is your valuable offense. It is responsible for proactively simulating real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities and security caps. They typically use advanced penetration testing methodology and network exploitation tools to create these real-world simulations. Job titles normally include penetration testers, ethical hackers, and more.

Purple Team: The Offensive-Informed Defense

A purple team is not a brand-new department or separate entity but rather a powerful collaboration of red and blue. Instead of working in silos with separate responsibilities, a purple team combines the best of both elements from both the red and blue teams.

With enhanced cooperation and collaboration, this powerful team bridges the gap between cybersecurity’s respective offense and defense sides. They work together to create real-world simulations that allow the traditional blue team to refine their own processes around mitigation and incident response. A continuous feedback loop makes this collaborative team highly efficient, keeping your business secure and proactive with emerging threats.

Now that you’re familiar with these basic definitions, let’s address the potential limitations of a traditional silo approach.

The Rise of Purple Teaming

Purple teaming wasn’t simply a creative way of creating a new IT team. Purple teaming began its rise in popularity as a more robust, holistic approach was needed for more sophisticated cybersecurity needs. For example, in 2023, data breaches rose 72 percent, surpassing the previous record.

In response to an intense need for better collaboration and integration between the two teams, cybersecurity experts formed a bridge to address the limitations of a traditional approach.

Addressing the Limitations of Traditional Approaches

It’s not a surprise that a decades-old cybersecurity structure no longer fits the new modern age. Cybercriminals are part of sophisticated, even state-sponsored groups that work around the clock to penetrate systems and exploit data. With the continued rise of the Internet of Things, more sensitive data than ever is online and interconnected, creating a potentially extremely vulnerable chain.

These emerging macro and micro-economic trends created the demand for bringing together these specialized teams to enhance security posture, continuously learn from each other, improve efficiency, and create tailored defense mechanisms.

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Security Controls

The answer to the limitations of traditional security approaches is a more collaborative, comprehensive cybersecurity approach. Look at a few other benefits of a purple team to enhance your security controls.

• Improved communication and collaboration.
• Faster and more responsive threat detection.
• Continuous feedback loops to constantly refine security measures.
• More adaptive, agile defenses.
• A holistic security framework covering known vulnerabilities and potential emerging threats.
• Better security compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Not only is a more robust team structure needed to enhance security controls, but this approach also offers other benefits, like integrating security into the product development lifecycle.

Integrating Security into Development and Operations

DevSecOps is another element of purple teaming, bringing security testing into every stage of the software development cycle. According to research, 50 percent of apps are always vulnerable in organizations without DevSecOps integrations, highlighting the importance of building security measures directly into software development. A purple team can be a critical component of this, improving your on-time delivery rate, improving early detection of potential vulnerabilities, speeding up time to market, and enhancing cost efficiency.

If you’re ready to potentially form a purple team, thoroughly assess your organization’s readiness for a more sophisticated structure,

Assessing the Suitability of Purple Teaming

First, assess whether your organization is at the right stage to build a powerful purple team. If you have limited resources, intense budget constraints, or a vastly immature security program, it might be a better use of time and energy to focus on foundational red and blue teams.

Evaluate Organizational Maturity

Start by evaluating your organizational maturity. If you have small, brand-new red and blue teams, you might not have the budget or resources to build a robust purple team. A strong blue (defense) team is crucial before building your red team of penetration testers. Also, building an integrated team might be even more confusing if red and blue teams are not well organized and lack their own structure.

Consider Resource Availability

Leadership buy-in, budget, and resources also play a role in assessing purple team readiness. If leadership doesn’t see the value in robust security measures or your IT budget is extremely limited, it’s best to focus on a strong foundational defense. Global IT spending is expected to hit a staggering $5.3 trillion as businesses pour resources and investments into shoring up their defenses.

Align with Business Objectives

A strong security posture has to align with overall business objectives. Your team needs leadership commitment, budget, and support as you implement this new team structure. Luckily, most executives rank security as a top priority, especially as 85 percent of cybersecurity executives are concerned about increasingly advanced AI perpetrating recent attacks.

To assess if your business objectives make sense with a purple team, ask the questions below:

• What specific security threats are we facing?
• What are our short-term and long-term security goals?
• Do we have the resources (budget and team) to adequately staff a purple team?

While a purple team is highly valuable, it might not always be the right option.

Now, let’s discuss how to build a formidable purple team strategy with the right people and the right tools.

How to Build a Formidable Purple Team Strategy

If you’re ready to take your security posture to the next level, it’s time to start tactically integrating your purple team.

1. Define Roles and Responsibilities

Start by finding unique rules and responsibilities within the purple team itself. You might want to assign a team leader and establish a red and blue representative. These leaders can guide their traditional team members and work closely together on any challenges.

2. Conduct Purple Team Exercises

Your purple team exercises are the secret sauce to overall success, and you want to develop a schedule that stimulates real-world attack scenarios, covering everything from phishing campaigns to backdoor attacks. Create an exhaustive list of simulations and tailor exercises to address specific vulnerabilities that challenge both blue and red processes and response plans. For example, almost 30 percent of adults in 2022 encountered a phishing attack, so this would be a must-have exercise to add to your schedule.

3. Use Tools and Techniques

A purple team uses the strongest tools and techniques from each team. For example, purple teams might work through penetration testing frameworks, threat emulation platforms, or different endpoint security tools. Plus, collaboration is extremely important when testing real-world simulations and providing feedback to each other. They will execute collaborative drills, analyze and document their results, and continuously iterate on their own processes.

While building a purple team is not the best option for every organization, it’s a step in the right direction of creating a robust and effective security strategy from end to end.

Move Forward With a Cybersecurity Purple Team

Unless your organization is small, limited in resources, or just starting with traditional red and blue teams, purple teaming offers significant benefits. By understanding the limitations of traditional approaches, executives and leaders see how a collaborative, integrated approach enhances overall security effectiveness.

Start by defining rules and responsibilities, practice purple team exercises, and use different tools and techniques to test your teams and document results.

Data breaches and ransomware attacks threaten financial stability and customer trust that could impact your organization for years to come. Our Cybersecurity experts can help you address your most pressing cybersecurity issues and keep compliance a continuous commitment at your organization. Let’s Talk