Common anti-patterns and pitfalls¶

Competitive rather than collaborative¶

Problem: Red and blue teams view purple teaming as competition. Red team tries to “win” by evading detection. Blue team feels defensive about gaps discovered.

Better: Shared goal is organisational resilience. Red team succeeding means organisation learns about gaps before real adversaries exploit them. Celebrate discoveries, not victories.

No follow-through on findings¶

Problem: Purple team exercises reveal gaps but nothing gets fixed. Same weaknesses discovered repeatedly because improvements never happen.

Better: Treat findings like vulnerabilities. Assign owners, set timelines, track remediation. Next exercise validates that improvements actually worked.

Overly complex scenarios¶

Problem: First purple team exercise tries to emulate sophisticated nation-state adversary with multi-stage attack across hybrid cloud environment.

Better: Start simple. Test basic attack paths and common defensive gaps. Build complexity gradually as both teams mature.

Inadequate preparation¶

Problem: Red team doesn’t document actions clearly. Blue team doesn’t prepare monitoring or response procedures. Exercise happens but learning is minimal.

Better: Invest time in planning. Clear objectives, defined scope, prepared scenarios, tested monitoring, ready playbooks.

Blame culture¶

Problem: Gaps discovered during exercises lead to finger-pointing. Blue team blamed for missing detection. IT team blamed for unpatched systems.

Better: Blameless post-mortems. Focus on systemic improvements, not individual fault. Purple teaming reveals organisational weaknesses, not personal failures.