Building blue team capability¶

Defensive maturity develops progressively. Start with foundations here and build upward with Red and blue capability building.

Foundational capabilities¶

Visibility basics: Centralised logging from critical systems, authentication logs, network traffic metadata, endpoint activity.

Core detections: Known-bad signatures (malware, exploit attempts), authentication failures and anomalies, privileged account usage.

Basic response: Defined incident response team, documented procedures for common scenarios, communication templates, evidence collection practices.

Developing capabilities¶

Enhanced monitoring: EDR on endpoints, network traffic analysis, cloud activity monitoring, application-level logging.

Improved detection: Correlation rules across systems, behavioural analytics, threat intelligence integration, custom detection engineering.

Tested response: Regular incident response exercises, purple team engagements, playbook refinement, cross-team coordination practice.

Threat hunting: Dedicated hunting capability, hypothesis-driven searches, documenting findings, converting hunts to automated detection.

Advanced capabilities¶

Continuous validation: Automated purple team testing, continuous detection tuning, coverage mapping against MITRE ATT&CK.

Predictive defence: Threat intelligence driving proactive hardening, predictive models identifying likely attack paths, pre-emptive defensive actions.

Autonomous response: SOAR-driven automatic containment, orchestrated response workflows, human oversight with machine execution speed.

Purple team integration: Continuous collaboration between offensive and defensive teams, real-time feedback loops, shared responsibility for security outcomes.