Preparation will always be essential to success, whether in cybersecurity or other parts of life. In the context of the former, being prepared and taking a proactive approach allows organisations to effectively defend against the ever-growing threat landscape, which entails regularly assessing security processes and controls to keep them up to date.

One way of conducting such assessments is red teaming and blue teaming, two well-established concepts in cybersecurity that help combat rapidly evolving cyber threats. Red teams take an offensive approach, with professional security members adept at attacking and breaking into systems. Blue teams are more on the defensive, comprising experts in threat prevention, detection and response, and maintaining internal network defences against cyber threats. The former simulates attacks using real-life adversarial techniques against the latter to address vulnerabilities in an organisation's security across its entire infrastructure.

The need for a more collaborative approach

Regardless of industry, size, or resources, every organisation needs the expertise of red and blue teams to stay ahead of cyber threats. Red team activities involve basic vulnerability research to full-scale cyber-attack simulations, which are designed to uncover security weaknesses by assessing detecting processes and techniques and going against blue teams.

Their assessments test an organisation's security against the latest tactics, tools, and procedures used by threat actors and provide critical feedback on improving their threat hunting, monitoring, and incident response. However, the reality for many companies is that these two teams are often completely disconnected and separate entities. For instance, in smaller organisations, the in-house IT staff tend to be tasked with network monitoring, threat detection, and response. In contrast, ethical hackers are assigned to conduct regular vulnerability scanning and pen testing services in Singapore.

This approach leads to insufficient continuous feedback channels between the two teams. Many organisations tend to adopt a short-term view of their security instead of constantly collaborating to enhance security controls and thus fail to leverage insights from red and blue teams to inform and develop long-term security goals and strategies.

The rise of purple teaming

Purple teaming is the solution to the shortcomings of conventional red and blue teaming. This security methodology has the two teams working closely together by establishing continuous feedback and knowledge transfer, maximising their cyber capabilities.

Purple teaming assists security teams in improving the effectiveness of network monitoring, threat hunting, and vulnerability detection through highly-accurate simulations for common threat scenarios and accelerating the development of new techniques for preventing and detecting new types of threats.

Purple teaming is often done as one-off focused engagements with clearly defined timelines, security goals, and key deliverables, as well as a formal process for evaluating the important lessons learned throughout the operation. Some key tasks include recognising defensive and offensive shortcomings and establishing future training and technical requirements.

Advantages of purple teaming

1. Gain critical insight

Purple teaming allows internal security teams to gain a deeper understanding of the gaps in their organisation's security posture and identify key areas for improvement.

2. Streamline security improvements

The cybersecurity industry can take an alternative approach to purple teaming and view it as a conceptual framework that runs across an organisation and nurtures a collaborative culture promoting continuous cybersecurity improvement.

3. Enhance security knowledge

The capability to participate and not just observe attacks allows blue teams to better understand how their adversaries operate. This will enable them to employ more effective technologies to outsmart real attackers and learn their tactics, techniques, and procedures.

4. Improve performance for the same budget

Combining offence and defence through purple team exercises lets organisations enhance their security monitoring function more quickly for less.

Conclusion

With the growing threat of cyber-attacks these days, organisations need to step up their defences and quickly patch the gaps in their security. Moving to a purple teaming approach helps achieve this goal quicker and more effectively.

To always be one step ahead of threat actors, get in touch with us at GROUP8 today for the most comprehensive industry-leading cybersecurity services in Singapore that maintain your organisation's security posture. For more information about our offensive-inspired cyber defence ecosystem, do not hesitate to contact us at hello@group8.co today.