Key Takeaways
- Purple teaming is a live, open collaboration between red and blue teams, not a surprise attack and not a once-a-year audit.
- Most exercises run against MITRE ATT&CK techniques, which gives red and blue a shared language for what got tested and what got missed.
- A good exercise ends with more than a PDF. You should walk away with tuned detections, updated playbooks, and a clear list of what still needs work.
- Programs mature in stages, from a single scheduled exercise to a continuous loop that tests techniques every week.
- Teams that lean on automation and AI for the repetitive parts see real payoff. Organizations that extensively use AI and automation in security operations report notably lower breach costs, according to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report.
Most security teams find out their detections do not work the same day an attacker proves it. Purple teaming exists to catch that problem earlier, on your terms, with your own red and blue teams in the room together.
What Purple Teaming Really Means
What is the goal of purple teaming? Simple to state, harder to pull off—prove that your detections catch the attacks you think they catch, before a real adversary tests that assumption for you. It is not a separate department. It is a working session where offense and defense sit at the same table and fix problems in real time.
Not Red Teaming, Not Blue Teaming, It’s the Handoff Between Both
A lot of people ask how is purple teaming different from penetration testing, and the honest answer is that it solves a different problem. A pentest hunts for vulnerabilities you can patch. A red team engagement tests whether your SOC can catch a real attack while staying quiet about it. Purple teaming skips the secrecy entirely.
The blue team knows the exercise is happening. The red team runs a technique, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and everyone watches together to see what fires and what stays silent. When something gets missed, the fix happens on the spot instead of waiting for a report nobody reads until the next quarter.
That shared framework matters more than people expect. When a detection engineer says a specific ATT&CK technique isn’t covered, the red teamer knows exactly what to test next. No translation needed, no guessing what “we might have a gap somewhere” actually means.
Why Security Teams Are Running These Exercises Now
Why do organizations run purple team exercises at all, given the extra coordination it takes? Because siloed testing has a track record of missing things. Nearly 6 in 10 red team findings never get actioned by the blue team when the two functions operate separately, and organizations that build purple-style collaboration into their process report far stronger detection rates against ransomware than teams that keep red and blue apart. When offense and defense fix gaps together, in the same session, that number changes fast.
Inside a Purple Team Exercise
How Does a Purple Team Exercise Work
Most exercises follow a rhythm that looks something like this:
- The team picks a threat scenario, usually built from real intelligence about groups that target your industry
- Red maps that scenario to specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques
- Red executes one technique at a time against a live or test environment
- Blue checks, in real time, whether the technique triggered an alert
- If nothing fired, the exercise pauses so both sides can figure out why
- The fix gets built, tested, and confirmed before moving to the next technique
What Happens During an Attack Simulation Exercise
During the simulation itself, red is not trying to win. There is no prize for staying hidden. The point is closer to a fire drill: run the scenario, watch what the building’s alarms actually do, and fix the ones that stay quiet. A single session might walk through anything from a phishing foothold to lateral movement to data staging, testing each stage of a realistic attack chain rather than one isolated exploit.
The Deliverables You Should Walk Away With
If a purple team exercise ends with only a slide deck, something went wrong. What deliverables come from a purple team exercise that’s actually working:
- A list of techniques tested, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, with a pass or fail for each
- New or tuned detection rules, already shipped, not just recommended
- Updated incident response playbooks that reflect what the team learned
- A prioritized backlog of the gaps that still need attention
- A baseline to measure the next exercise against
MITRE ATT&CK and Threat-Informed Defense
What is threat-informed defense, and why does it show up in nearly every purple teaming conversation? It’s the practice of building your detections around how real attackers actually behave, instead of guessing. MITRE ATT&CK catalogs those behaviors, from initial access to data theft, and gives defenders a common map to work from. MITRE’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense maintains the research behind this approach, and it’s become the backbone most purple team programs build on.
Building a Purple Team Program That Sticks
The Skills Your Purple Team Needs
What skills does a purple team need to actually pull this off? It’s less about hiring a brand new team and more about getting your existing red and blue talent to work from the same playbook. The core skills worth having in the room:
- Adversary emulation, so someone can build a realistic attack chain rather than a random exploit
- Detection engineering, so findings turn into working SIEM rules instead of a wish list
- Threat intelligence, so the scenarios you test actually match what’s targeting your industry
- Communication, since the entire model depends on red and blue explaining findings to each other clearly, not just to a report
Where You Land on the Purple Team Maturity Model
Programs do not start continuous. They build up to it. So what is the purple team maturity model most teams recognize? A rough version looks like this:
| Stage | What It Looks Like |
| Ad hoc | Red and blue rarely talk. Testing happens once a year, if at all. |
| Coordinated | Scheduled exercises exist. A handful of ATT&CK techniques get tested with both sides in the room. |
| Structured | Formal attack chains, tracked metrics, and a real feedback loop between red findings and blue fixes. |
| Continuous | Testing runs on a weekly cadence or faster, often with automation handling the repetitive parts. |
From One Big Exercise to Continuous Purple Teaming
What is continuous purple teaming, and is it worth the effort to get there? It means testing techniques on an ongoing schedule instead of saving everything for one big event. And that ties straight into how does purple teaming improve detection engineering: a rule only earns trust once it’s been proven against a real attack chain and then tested again after the environment changes.
A once-a-year red team test cannot keep pace with attackers who weaponize new vulnerabilities within days of disclosure, as evidenced by the rapid exploitation of zero-days and the shrinking window between CVE publication and active exploitation, which is a big part of why more programs are moving toward that continuous model instead of treating testing as an annual checkbox.
Where Secure.com’s SOC Teammate Fits In
Purple team exercises only deliver value when your SOC can quickly act on findings. That’s the part Secure.com’s SOC Teammate is built for. It ingests signals from your SIEM, EDR, IAM, and cloud stack, maps activity straight to MITRE ATT&CK, and turns raw alerts into prioritized cases instead of noise.
When a purple team exercise flags a missed detection, that gap needs to become a shipped rule fast, not a task sitting in a backlog. Secure.com’s SOC Teammate augments your team by automating the detection, triage, and investigation work around that fix, while keeping high-impact actions like host isolation or disabling an account behind a human approval step. You get the speed a continuous program requires, with human oversight on critical decisions like host isolation or account disabling.
For teams looking to move past the once-a-year exercise, Secure.com’s breakdown of automating the purple team loop with AI walks through what that continuous pipeline looks like in practice, and how detection as code keeps every fix versioned and testable.
FAQs
Is purple teaming the same thing as a penetration test?
When should a company start purple teaming?
How often should purple team exercises run?
Can a small security team realistically run a purple team program?
The Bottom Line
Purple teaming works because it removes the guesswork. Instead of assuming your detections will hold up, you test them, on purpose, with both sides of the security team in the room. Start small if you need to. A handful of well-chosen ATT&CK techniques tested with real follow-through beats a sprawling exercise nobody has time to act on. The programs that get the most out of purple teaming are the ones that treat it as an ongoing habit, not an annual event to check off a list.
