The Difference Between Red, Blue, and Purple Teams

One of the best ways to verify the security posture of a business is to perform a mock attack. This principle is behind the concept of penetration testing (manual mock attack) and vulnerability scanning (automatic mock attack). While penetration tests and vulnerability scans are performed regularly, there is a specific type of a wargaming activity that is quite effective for maintaining security: the red team vs. blue team exercise.

Red Team and Blue Team Concepts-

In information security, the red team is a specialized team of external security professionals. The only purpose of this team is to compromise security controls of your business to show where their weaknesses are. The blue team is a specialized internal security team. Its purpose is real-time incident response – to prevent the red team from succeeding.
Some exercises also include a purple team that is more of a function than a team. The only goal of the purple team is to learn from the red team and pass the knowledge onto the blue team.
The terms red team and blue team are not limited to cybersecurity only – they come from the military. Red team vs. blue team exercises are performed in many environments and in many ways. For example, in national security, you can have a red team that attempts to spread false information and a blue team that attempts to eliminate that information and expose the falseness.
In some cases, the red team may be an internal security analyst team that is delegated to the outside to perform the attack. However, an external entity is preferred because it represents real attackers better.

Definitions:

# Red Teams are internal or entities dedicated to testing the effectiveness of a security program by emulating the tools and techniques of likely attackers in the most realistic way possible. The practice is similar, but not identical to, Penetration Testing, and involves the pursuit of one or more objectives—usually executed as a campaign.

Red team skills:

1. Think outside the box

2. Deep knowledge of systems

3. Software development

4. Penetration testing

5. Social engineering

# Blue Teams refer to the internal security team that defends against both real attackers and Red Teams. Blue Teams should be distinguished from standard security teams in most organizations, as most security operations teams do not have a mentality of constant vigilance against attack, which is the mission and perspective of a true Blue Team.

Blue team skills:

1. Organized and detail-oriented

2. Cybersecurity analysis and threat profile

3. Hardening techniques

4. Knowledge of detection systems

5. SIEM

#Purple Teams exist to ensure and maximize the effectiveness of the Red and Blue teams. They do this by integrating the defensive tactics and controls from the Blue Team with the threats and vulnerabilities found by the Red Team into a single narrative that maximizes both. Ideally Purple shouldn’t be a team at all, but rather a permanent dynamic between Red and Blue.

Purple Teams are designed to enhance information sharing between the Red and Blue teams to maximize their respective and combined effectiveness. All three functions share the ultimate purpose of improving the organization’s defenses. Red does this through attack, Blue through defense, and Purple by ensuring that the previous two are cooperating.

A Summary of Security Function Colors:

• Yellow: Builder

• Red: Attacker

• Blue: Defender

• Green: Builder learns from defender

• Purple: Defender learns from attacker

• Orange: Builder learns from attacker