Purple Team Penetration Testing
A red team can prove your defenses were beaten. A purple team makes sure your defenders actually learn from it.
A guide to purple teaming, how it differs from red and blue engagements, and what a collaborative testing program looks like in practice.
What is Purple Team Penetration Testing?
Purple team testing is a collaborative exercise where attackers and defenders work side by side instead of separately. Where a red team simulates real attack techniques, and a blue team actively watches, responds, and learns, in real time, rather than finding out what happened when a report lands weeks later.
The name comes from mixing those colors: red (offense) and blue (defense) working together as one team, which makes purple. Instead of testing whether an attacker can get in, a purple team engagement tests whether your defenders can see it happening, understand it, and respond, and it uses that real-time visibility to close the gaps immediately rather than after the fact.
Most organizations have some vulnerabilities that a sufficiently motivated attacker could attempt to exploit. The goal of a purple team test is learning about what happens after that attack: when someone clicks a link or when a vulnerability gets exploited, where does that access actually lead, and would anyone inside the company notice along the way?
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Red Team vs. Blue Team vs. Purple Team
| Red Team | Blue Team | Purple Team |
|---|---|---|
| RoleOffense | RoleDefense | RoleCollaboration |
| Skilled testers simulate real-world attacks, typically without your defenders' knowledge, to see what a genuine adversary could accomplish. | Your security analysts, network administrators, and incident responders, already on staff, responsible for detecting and stopping attacks as they happen. | Red and blue work together, often in the same room or call, testing specific controls and detection capabilities in real time. |
| ScopeBroad: technology, processes, and people, run covertly. | ScopeEverything: patching, monitoring, response plans, user awareness. | ScopeTargeted: a specific technique, alert, or response process. |
| OutputA report on what was breached and how far it went. | OutputDay-to-day detection and response, tested only when something happens. | OutputTuned detections and a defending team with hands-on experience. |
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Why Purple Teaming Works
Purple teaming exercises are collaborations between your blue team and our red team, giving your security analysts and incident responders the ability to ask questions and learn directly from the people conducting the attacks. This helps your team practice responding to incidents, lets the organization choose key targets, and gives you both a report and skill-building resources.
Tightens Detection and Response, Not Just Prevention
Most testing focuses on where and how an attacker could get in. Purple teaming gives the security team a chance to find out how well their tools work in practice. During these engagements, the blue team can tune alerting, close logging gaps, and validate that their tools are actually catching what they’re supposed to catch. This happens while the test is still running, when your teams can ask questions directly, instead of making guesses after the report ships.
During one of our engagements, testers found a file upload function that had been removed from the visible interface, but could still be reached through the underlying web service. The internal team believed this function did not exist at all. In another, testers found a web application firewall (WAF) that had been left running in “learn” mode during an earlier scan, which had quietly been trained to treat SQL injection (SQLi) attempts as normal traffic. On paper, the firewall was active. In practice, it was not blocking anything. No one would have known without watching it fail to respond in real time.
Targeted, and Often More Affordable
Because purple teaming focuses on specific controls rather than an entire covert attack chain, it typically costs less than a full red team engagement and produces a tighter, more actionable set of findings. For organizations that aren’t ready for the scope and cost of a full red team exercise, purple teaming is a practical way to start testing detection capabilities without an all-or-nothing commitment.
Turns Findings Into Skills, Not Just a Report
Standard red team engagements end with a report describing what worked and what didn’t. By contrast, purple teaming puts your security team in the room with the pentesters while the attacks are happening. When a blue team watches an attack unfold instead of reading about it later, they gain a working knowledge of what to look for and how to respond, instead of traffic to triage after an attack.
That real-time visibility catches things a report alone never could. During one engagement, a client’s team noticed a small burst of traffic hitting their antivirus server and assumed they were under active attack. They weren’t. It was routine agent check-in traffic they had never looked at that closely before. Nobody had done anything wrong, but this revealed that nobody knew what normal traffic looked like either. Getting a clear baseline is the kind of insight that only real-time collaboration surfaces.
Who Needs Purple Team Testing?
Organizations should consider purple teaming if they…
How a Purple Team Engagement Works
The Red and Blue teams don’t just take turns. The two run the engagement together, crossing paths at each stage of the engagement
Rather than a broad covert simulation, each stage is scoped around specific detection and response capabilities your team wants to validate, with red and blue crossing paths at every step.
An evaluation of your security program against the PCI Data Security Standard, covering PCI security assessments, self-assessment support, and advising on scope, applicability, and controls. You get direct access to a Qualified Security Assessor who speaks plainly and knows the standard inside and out.
Led by the “PCI Guy” himself – Jeff Man.
Building a Culture of Collaboration
Purple teaming works best when it can be more than a one-time event bolted onto an otherwise siloed security program. The organizations that get the most out of it are ones already working to break down the wall between offense and defense, and between security and the rest of the business.
This means shifting Security left: training developers and giving them tools that fit how they already work, letting them catch vulnerabilities before they ship. But it also means shifting Engineering right, and encouraging security teams to understand the systems they’re testing well enough to give practical, specific guidance instead of vague warnings. And it means communicating up and down the organization in language that connects security findings to business risk, so that teams understand how they can strengthen the organization’s security, and fixes can be prioritized instead of waiting for next year’s test.
Purple teaming engagements are a preview of what that culture looks like in practice: red and blue in the same room, working the same problem, instead of being two departments that only talk to each other through a report.
How Secure Ideas Approaches Purple Teaming
Secure Ideas builds purple team engagements around your defenders, rather than following steps in a generic playbook. Our CREST-accredited testers explain their testing techniques as they go, letting your blue team walk away with working knowledge of what happened, instead of a list of traffic to scan for.
Engagements are built around the specific controls, detections, and response processes that your teams actually want to validate, rather than a one-size-fits-all simulation. Our focus on real-time collaboration during testing means that gaps can get tuned while the exercise is running, instead of becoming broad recommendations in a report weeks later.
Every engagement ends with a joint debrief, bringing the red and blue teams in the room for the same conversation, where priorities can be set together, instead of being handed down.
Beyond the Test
Building Continuous Resilience
A single purple team engagement is a strong starting point, but detection capabilities need the same ongoing attention as everything else in your environment. As new tools are deployed, staff turns over, and the techniques attackers use keep evolving, this can all quietly erode the gains from a one-time exercise.
This is exactly what Secure Ideas’ PETaaS® (Professionally Evil Testing as a Service) is designed for. PETaaS® supports red, blue, and purple team work through a flexible credits-based model, with ongoing advisory services and real-time communication built in. Between formal engagements, PETaaS® keeps testing and collaboration active instead of letting it lapse until next year’s budget cycle.
Think of a purple team engagement as the training session where your defenders learn the moves. PETaaS® is what keeps them in practice.
Purple
Teaming
Frequently
Asked
Questions
Have a question that isn’t answered here?
See our full FAQ page.
Is this the same as a tabletop exercise?
No. Although the two are related.
A tabletop exercise walks your team through a hypothetical incident on paper, everyone talking through what they’d do.
Purple teaming replaces the hypothetical with an actual, live technique running against your real systems. This means that your team is using their real tools and real procedures against real attack patterns, instead of the security team reading and describing what they could do, in theory.
Is purple teaming a replacement for a red team engagement?
No. Purple teaming is more targeted and collaborative, and focuses on specific controls and detection capabilities.
A full red team engagement still has a place for organizations that want a broad, covert simulation of a real attacker with no advance warning to defenders.
Do we need an internal blue team to do purple teaming?
Yes, in some form. Purple teaming requires defenders. Whether that’s a dedicated SOC, a handful of IT staff wearing a security hat, or an internal red team collaborating with outside testers.
We build the exercise around your existing detection and response capability, whatever shape that currently takes.
How is this different from a standard pentest?
A standard pentest focuses on finding and reporting vulnerabilities based on a pre-defined scope, and typically occurs without the active involvement of your security team.
Purple teaming is a collaborative exercise that focuses on whether your team can detect and respond to an active attack, using the test itself as a live training exercise for defenders.
How often should we run a purple team exercise?
That depends on how much your environment and tooling change. For organizations investing heavily in new detection capabilities, they may benefit from more frequent engagements to validate that investment as it’s built out. Organizations with a more mature detection and response function that changes less may benefit more from a red team exercise.
Can we see a sample report from a Penetration Test?
Absolutely. Any reputable penetration testing company should provide sample reports upon request. Reports are your primary deliverable and should include an executive summary, testing narrative, detailed findings with risk ratings, replication steps for verification, and actionable remediation recommendations. Not all reports are created equal, so reviewing samples helps ensure the format and content meet your needs. Most companies will accommodate reasonable modifications to reporting formats.
What is Professionally Evil Testing as a Service (PETaaS®)?
PETaaS® is on-demand pentesting services, which provides you with continuous access to our penetration testing expertise rather than a one-time assessment. This approach offers on-demand or scheduled testing, which integrates with your software development lifecycle, and delivers regular vulnerability analysis with ongoing support. While it may initially appear more expensive than traditional testing, PETaaS® is significantly more cost-effective than hiring full-time security staff and provides proactive, real-time vulnerability identification.
Note: The industry lacks a standard definition for penetration testing as a service, so verify that your provider’s approach aligns with your expectations.
Other Pentesting Approaches
Continuous Penetration Testing
Continuous Pentesting keeps testing running instead of leaving your network exposed between annual checkups. We pair ongoing vulnerability scanning with a real consultant reviewing the results, and catching new risks as they appear across web apps, APIs, and IoT ecosystems. Regular reporting means you always know what’s new, what has changed, and where to point the roadmap next.
Security that doesn’t wait for next year’s test.
Threat-Led Penetration Testing
Threat-Led Pentesting simulates the specific tactics, techniques, and procedures of the threat actors most likely to target your organization, instead of following a generic playbook. We work with you to identify relevant adversaries and scenarios, then build a bespoke test around them. It’s the approach DORA now mandates for certain financial entities, and happens to be a strong fit for any mature security program.
Tested against the threats actually coming for you.
Red Team Penetration Testing
Red Team Pentesting engagements go beyond finding vulnerabilities. Our consultants simulate a determined adversary, and chain together recon, phishing, and physical access attempts to show how far a real attacker could get and what they could walk away with. Most engagements wrap up in a month or less, with reporting delivered within a week.
See your whole attack surface the way an attacker does.
Ride Along Penetration Testing
Ride Along Pentesting embeds our consultants directly with your internal security team, working side-by-side instead of independently. Your team gets a front-row seat to our techniques and methodology, letting them pick up skills in real time as the engagement unfolds. It’s a hands-on way to level up your team while still getting a full assessment.
Testing that trains your team while it runs.
Time-Boxed Penetration Testing
Time-Boxed Pentesting focuses effort on your highest-priority assets within a set window, instead of trying to cover everything at once. It’s a strong fit for large environments, budget-conscious teams, or anyone just getting started with testing. We work to set the scope through a quick scoping call, so the timeframe fits your risk profile, instead of a generic template.
Focused coverage, built to fit your timeline.
Recognized authority and trusted guidance built on years of uncovering risks for organizations like yours.
Purple Teaming
for Success
