Working with purple team for improvement¶

Blue team isn’t isolated. Purple teaming provides opportunities to validate detections, test responses, and learn from simulated attacks.

Before purple team exercises¶

Define success criteria: What detections should fire? What response procedures should execute? What’s the expected timeline?

Baseline current capabilities: Document what monitoring exists, what alerts are configured, what response playbooks are ready.

Identify focus areas: What specific defensive capabilities need testing? New EDR deployment? Updated detection rules? Incident response procedures?

During purple team exercises¶

Monitor in real-time: Watch for alerts, detections, and anomalies as red team operates. Document what triggered and what didn’t.

Maintain operational tempo: Continue normal defensive operations. Don’t pause everything for the exercise.

Communicate observations: Share what’s being detected (or not) with purple team facilitator so red team can adjust pace or tactics.

Practice response: If detection occurs, execute actual response procedures. Test your playbooks under realistic conditions.

After purple team exercises¶

Gap analysis: Compare what should have been detected against what was detected. Identify blind spots, missed alerts, delayed detections.

Detection engineering: Build new rules, tune existing alerts, improve correlation logic based on red team TTPs.

Playbook updates: Refine incident response procedures based on exercise learnings. Add missing steps, clarify roles, improve communication.

Tool effectiveness assessment: Did EDR catch malware? Did SIEM correlate events? Did deception technology work? Validate security investments.

Prioritised improvements: Create backlog of defensive enhancements with clear owners and timelines. Track completion before next exercise.