Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture Through Purple Team Engagements

As cyber threats continue to evolve, threat actors use increasingly more sophisticated tools, tactics, and techniques. Traditional offensive security services, such as penetration testing, are not enough to help organizations identify security gaps. Effective cybersecurity programs need purple team engagements to strengthen their ability to detect and prevent attacks across the entire Cyber Kill Chain.

A purple team approach can be especially valuable in addressing the Unified Cyber Kill Chain, which expands on Lockheed Martin’s Cyber Kill Chain by dividing attacks into three sections: Initial Foothold, Network Propagation, and Actions on Objectives. Successfully preventing an attack requires breaking the chain at multiple points, and a purple team engagement provides the collaborative framework needed to achieve this.

To combat threats effectively, companies must improve their capacity to detect and prevent indicators of compromise (IOCs) within the Cyber Kill Chain, especially at the higher levels of the Pyramid of Pain. The Pyramid of Pain concept is essential for understanding the different levels of IOCs and the “pain” they cause adversaries when detected and denied. Each level of the pyramid represents a type of IOC, with higher levels causing more disruption to attackers. By focusing on an adversary’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), purple team exercises can enhance detection capabilities and disrupt the kill chain before attackers achieve their objectives.’

What is Purple Teaming?

A purple team engagement is a cybersecurity exercise where both offensive (red) and defensive (blue) security teams work together to improve an organization’s security telemetry, logging, alerting, and response processes. Unlike penetration testing, which focuses solely on identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities, or red teaming, which emulates real-world malicious adversaries and their associated tactics and techniques, purple teaming emphasizes collaboration and knowledge-sharing between the client blue team and the consulting purple team. The goal is to enhance the blue team’s ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate security threats by leveraging insights from common attacker TTPs. Both teams work in real-time, iteratively testing and refining detection capabilities, ultimately resulting in a more resilient security environment.

Converge’s purple teaming approach is a collaborative effort that leverages the MITRE ATT&CK framework to identify common tactics and techniques. Converge works with our clients to identify a set of tactics and techniques to test across one or more categories (e.g., initial access, privilege escalation, credential access, lateral movement, etc.). Converge then executes each tactic and technique, recording the date, time, and procedure that was executed. The client blue team is engaged to determine whether the activity was logged, whether any aspect was prevented, and whether an alert was generated for the activity.

What are the Benefits?

At this point, the benefits of purple teaming are probably clear. These engagements enable organizations to implement high-fidelity alerts for common adversarial tactics and techniques. This in turn enables faster identification and response to potentially malicious behavior within the network. It helps the blue team better identify needles in the haystacks. As a collaborative and iterative process, it also enables continuous improvement in detection, alerting, and response capabilities.

A successful purple teaming engagement requires upfront preparation. The focus is on identifying key TTPs for which the organization wants to validate alerting visibility. The consultancy performing the purple team engagement works closely with the company to select TTPs that align with threat intelligence, prior experience, and the organization’s capabilities.

In summary, purple teaming drives better security outcomes through continuous improvement, reduces risk and response times, and optimizes security investments. It’s a proactive approach that enables organizations to stay ahead of threats and make smarter business decisions.

When is Purple Teaming a Fit?

While valuable, purple teaming is not for every organization. It’s most effective when leveraged to improve telemetry and detective capabilities and where there’s a strong organizational fit. Purple teaming is well-suited for organizations that have implemented an enterprise security information and event management (SIEM) solution and an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution and have servers, client operating systems, and the EDR solution forwarding logs to the SIEM. Additionally, organizations should have performed several penetration tests and matured their cybersecurity program to expand beyond vulnerability triage and remediation.

Preparing for a Purple Team Engagement

Proper preparation is crucial for a successful purple team engagement. Organizations should review the MITRE ATT&CK framework to identify relevant categories and sub-techniques for testing. Focusing first on less sophisticated techniques helps build a strong foundation in detecting common attack methods. Over time, the scope should expand to more sophisticated, difficult-to-detect techniques.

Key Outcome Objectives

Key outcomes of a quality purple team engagement include:

1. Enhanced Defensive Capabilities: Blue teams gain real-time insights from red team activities. This allows them to improve detection and response capabilities, which reduces the risk of data breaches.
2. Faster Response: By collaborating with red teams, blue teams can develop faster and more efficient responses to cyber incidents. This reduces downtime during an actual breach and minimizes business disruption.

3. Reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): Purple teaming helps improve the metrics around threat detection and response, translating into lower overall operational risk.
4. Optimized Use of Security Investments: By revealing which tools, technologies, and processes are most effective in stopping attacks, organizations can better allocate cybersecurity budgets and resources.
5. Improved Auditing and Compliance: Organizations can refine their security controls and improve adherence to regulatory and industry standards. This supports audit readiness and ensures that security frameworks, such as NIST or ISO 27001, are effectively implemented.
6. Reduced Risk: Through continuous testing and adaptation, organizations can significantly lower the risk of successful cyberattacks, thereby safeguarding critical assets, intellectual property, and sensitive customer information.
7. Upskilling Teams: Both red and blue teams learn from each other during exercises, leading to improved overall security knowledge and stronger internal capabilities.
8. Data-Driven Security Improvements: Purple teaming generates valuable data about the effectiveness of security tools, policies, and personnel. Security leaders can use these insights to make more informed decisions about future security investments and risk management strategies.

The end result is a report documenting the techniques used and whether or not logging, prevention, and alerting successfully identified and/or prevented each technique. The final report scores the alerting and response capabilities of the target company by MITRE ATT&CK category. This enables clients to iteratively compare results over time and validate improvements across each category. This approach facilitates increasing the breadth and depth of alert accuracy over time.

Conclusion

Purple teaming significantly enhances an organization’s ability to detect and respond to attacks. If your organization has implemented SIEM and EDR tools and conducted penetration tests, consider adding a purple team component to your next assessment. Contact Converge to discover how a tailored purple team engagement can fortify your cybersecurity posture and help you stay ahead of evolving threats.