How BAS Unites Red, Blue and Purple Teams for Stronger Cyber Defense

Key Takeaways

• Red, Blue, and Purple Teams each serve essential but complementary roles in cyber defense, Red pressure-tests, Blue protects, and Purple teaming accelerates collaboration and improvement.
• All three teams face shared challenges such as limited staffing, alert overload, growing attack surfaces, and the increasing speed and sophistication of adversaries.
• Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) empowers every team by automating adversary TTP execution, validating real defensive performance, and providing repeatable, evidence-driven insights.
• Automation and real-time threat intelligence enable understaffed teams to stay competitive, reducing manual work, detecting drift, and ensuring defenses scale at attacker speed.

The Core Functions of Red, Blue and Purple Teams in Cybersecurity

2.1 The Defensive Line: Blue Team

The blue team is the organization’s defensive security force, responsible for protecting systems, data, and users from cyber threats. Their mission is to detect malicious activity quickly, analyze what is happening, contain the threat, and restore normal operations, all while strengthening the security environment so future attacks are harder to execute.

Purpose and Value of Blue Teaming 

A blue team is far more than a group that “watches logs.” It is a coordinated defensive function that spans several core disciplines;

• Threat Detection & Monitoring: Utilizing SIEM, EDR, XDR, and related telemetry sources to identify suspicious activity, correlate signals, and triage alerts.
• Incident Response & Containment: Investigating security events, determining root causes, stopping active threats, and coordinating recovery actions across the organization.
• Security Engineering & Hardening: Configuring, tuning, and optimizing security controls (e.g., firewalls, endpoint protection, identity and access policies) to reduce attack opportunities and improve resilience.
• Threat Hunting: Proactively searching for indicators of compromise or stealthy adversary activity that may not yet have triggered automated detection.
• Continuous Improvement: Reviewing past incidents, identifying defensive gaps, and refining tools, detections, and processes to strengthen the organization’s overall security posture.

They must detect and respond using telemetry, exposure data, and validated control performance, not assumptions.

2.2 The Offensive Force: Red Team

The Red Team functions as the organization’s adversarial force, dedicated to emulating the TTPs of advanced threat actors, malware campaigns, APT groups, ransomware operators, and other highly capable adversaries. Their mission is to design and execute full, realistic attack kill chains based on the most sophisticated behaviors observed in the wild.

These scenarios are crafted and executed by expert operators who replicate how real attackers plan, adapt, and maneuver in a live environment.

Unlike vulnerability scanning, compliance checks, or scripted penetration tests, Red Team engagements are not about identifying lists of issues. Instead, they are about constructing credible, end-to-end attack operations that reflect genuine threat actor behavior and then observing how the organization’s controls, processes, and people respond.

Through this approach, Red Teams provide a high-fidelity view of the organization’s true defensive readiness.

Purpose and Value of Red Teaming Engagements

Red Teams answer the fundamental question:

“If a capable adversary were to target us today, what techniques would they be able to execute, and how long could they persist, maintain access, and exfiltrate sensitive information before our defenses detect, contain, or disrupt them?”

To answer this, Red Teams:

• Create and execute full attack kill chains aligned with modern adversary tradecraft
• Test the ability of prevention and detection layer solutions to withstand real-world attack sequences
• Assess how SOC analysts, IR teams, and processes react when confronted with live adversary activity
• Identify operational blind spots that automated scanners inherently miss due to their limited visibility and absence of execution-based validation.

2.3 The Bridge in Between: What Is a Purple Team?

Purple teaming is the operational collaboration between red and blue teams to test, observe, learn, and improve security defenses in real time.

• The red team emulates real adversaries using advanced TTPs.
• The blue team analyzes defensive performance: what blocked, what detected, and what silently failed.
• Both sides then share insights immediately, refine controls, adjust detections, and rerun the scenario.
• The loop continues until the defensive posture is measurably stronger.

Purple teaming is not a new team, not a softer red team, and not a one-off exercise, it’s a continuous validation and improvement process.

As Chris Dale, Principal Instructor at SANS, put it during our recent BAS Summit:

"I want to see less of this red versus blue. I want convergence. I want us making one another good."

2.3.1 Why Does Purple Teaming in Cybersecurity Exist?

In most organizations, red and blue teams operate correctly, but separately. Red launches an engagement, publishes findings, and steps away. Blue continues its daily fight against an overwhelming volume of alerts, many of which lack context or adversarial relevance. Both functions are doing their jobs, yet neither sees the entire picture.

The result is predictable:

• Gaps are identified once but never validated again.
• Fixes are deployed but never re-tested.
• Controls drift.
• Defense plateau.

Purple teaming changes this dynamic. Instead of working in silos, red and blue tackle the same problem collaboratively, turning each attack into an immediate learning opportunity and every defensive adjustment into a verifiable outcome. 

2.3.2 Purpose and Value of Purple Teaming 

The purple teaming process replaces long feedback cycles with direct, iterative validation where:

• Findings turn into evidence, not assumptions.
• Improvements are confirmed immediately, not months later.
• The distance between offense and defense shrinks with every iteration.

Purple teaming’s value is straightforward: it replaces the big old red vs. blue rivalry with convergence and static testing with a living, measurable improvement cycle. Once organizations experience this continuous loop of adversarial action and defensive refinement, they rarely return to traditional, one-directional exercises.

The loop becomes the operating model, and the operating model becomes the advantage.

Comparative Understanding of Red Team vs. Blue Team

3.1 What Are the Key Differences Between Red and Blue Teams in Cybersecurity?

3.2 Are Red Teams Better Than Blue Teams for Detection?

Myth: “Red teams are better at detection because they find more.”

Myth Buesting: No. Red teams are not better at detection, because they aren’t detection teams.

Red teams expose where defenses fail; blue teams are the ones responsible for seeing attacks in the first place. When a red team “finds more,” it simply proves the blue team didn’t detect them.

Red teams don’t detect; they force detection moments. They behave like real adversaries to reveal blind spots, misconfigurations, and broken assumptions. Their findings are powerful, but they are snapshots, not sustained visibility. Blue teams own the continuous grind: monitoring, tuning, hunting, and responding around the clock.

This isn’t a competition. It’s a dependency. Red teams pressure-test reality. Blue teams operate reality. The question isn’t who’s better, it’s how fast an organization can turn red-team evidence into blue-team detection.

That speed, the validation loop, is the real measure of detection maturity.

3.3 How Often Should Organizations Run Red Team Versus Blue Team Drills?

Traditional guidance says:

• Run a red team exercise once or twice a year.
• Conduct blue team drills quarterly or during major incidents.

That advice no longer holds.

Modern environments change weekly. Identities shift, new assets appear, misconfigurations creep in, and threat actors iterate faster than any manual schedule. A static cadence guarantees drift.

Red and blue exercises shouldn’t follow a calendar, they should follow your rate of change.

3.4 Continuous Red and Blue Teaming: Purple Teaming as a Better Model

TL:DR; Annual red teams are a snapshot. Continuous validation is resilience.

Run red-team style validation continuously. 

Not by deploying full manual engagements every week, but by automating the adversarial actions that matter: privilege escalation attempts, lateral movement techniques, credential abuse, exfiltration scenarios, ransomware precursors, and behavior-based TTPs. This turns red teaming from a periodic project into a continuous pressure-test of the defensive stack.

Run blue team drills continuously as well. 

Your SOC must validate whether detections fire, whether tuning sticks, and whether regressions occur after system updates, configuration changes, or new deployments. This operational loop, attack, observe, fix, re-test -- is what defines real maturity.

The smarter question is not, "How often should we run red and blue drills? "It's: "How tightly can we compress the validation loop so that exposure never gets ahead of assurance?"

Note that, today, the only practical way to achieve that compression is with Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)-powered purple teaming (we will talk about it throughout the blog), where adversary behaviors are emulated and simulated daily, defensive performance is measured instantly, and improvements are verified the moment they ship. 

How to Build a Successful Purple Team Program?

4.1 Who Should Participate in a Purple Team Assessment?

A purple team assessment only works when the right people are in the room. It is not a red-team show with blue observers, nor a defensive workshop with occasional offensive input. It is a joint operational exercise, and each participant has a defined role in the validation loop.

• Red Team Operators — Execute adversary TTPs and explain attacker intent and behavior.
• Blue Team Analysts & Detection Engineers — Observe telemetry, tune detections, and close defensive gaps.
• Incident Response Specialists — Validate containment steps, escalation paths, and playbook effectiveness.
• Security Engineering / Platform Owners — Adjust and verify configurations across EDR, XDR, firewalls, identity, cloud, and network controls.
• Threat Intelligence Analysts — Ensure TTPs align with relevant threat groups and current campaigns.
• System & Control Owners — Provide architectural context and support fixes for targeted assets.
• BAS / Automation Leads — If the organization uses Breach and Attack Simulation, this team runs the adversarial scenarios (TTPs), collects validated evidence, and accelerates iteration. They enable faster loops: attack → observe → fix → re-test.
•  Purple Team Lead / Facilitator — Coordinate objectives and maintain the iterative attack–observe–fix–validate workflow.

4.2 What Should We Test for in a Purple Team Assessment?

A purple team assessment should focus on validating how well your defenses work in reality, not in theory. The goal is to measure performance across the full prevention and defensive lifecycle and gather evidence that proves whether improvements actually reduce risk. 

These are the core areas every organization should test.

4.3 How to Measure ROI of Purple Teaming Exercises?

This table focuses on measurable, defensible ROI indicators that tie directly to operational, financial, and security outcomes.

4.4 Best Practices for Sharing Findings Between Red and Blue Teams?

These best practices keep purple teaming collaborative, fast, and evidence-driven rather than adversarial or bureaucratic.

How These Teams Operate in Practice

5.1 What Are the Recommended Frameworks and Tools for Purple Team Exercises?

Purple team exercises rely on frameworks that standardize adversary behaviors and tools that let teams safely emulate and validate those behaviors in real environments. (See the red vs. blue comparison table if you need the red and blue teaming tooling.)

• The foundational framework is MITRE ATT&CK, which provides the technique-level structure for planning, executing, and mapping both offensive actions and defensive telemetry. 
• Complementary frameworks such as NIST 800-53, CIS Controls, and MITRE D3FEND help align detection engineering and defensive hardening with best practices.
• On the tooling side, organizations use a combination of EDR/XDR telemetry, SIEM platforms, and threat intelligence feeds to observe and analyze defensive performance. 

For execution and validation, teams increasingly rely on Breach and Attack Simulation platforms, which automate adversary TTP emulation, measure control effectiveness, and provide repeatable, safe, and scalable validation. 

5.2 What Is the Difference Between a Purple Team and a Penetration Test in Practice?

Penetration testing is a goal-driven intrusion exercise. It tries to answer one deep question: If an attacker gains a foothold, how far can they go? The test focuses on completing a defined objective such as reaching Domain Admin or demonstrating the ability to encrypt or exfiltrate sensitive data. 

To get there, pentesters operate with stealth and evasion, chaining seemingly-isolated security weaknesses exactly as a real attacker would: abusing SMB for remote execution, forcing AD authentication, escalating privileges, dumping LSASS, cracking Kerberos tickets, extracting secrets, harvesting RDP credentials, and performing advanced directory enumeration. The purpose is to prove impact by acting like a sophisticated hacker under coverage, not to measure whether the SOC sees what is happening. A pentest is a snapshot of how compromise unfolds under current conditions.

Purple teaming is very different. 

It is a collaborative, detection-first validation loop, not a stealthy intrusion. Instead of asking how far the attacker can go, it asks: Do our defenses see, stop, and respond to each of these techniques? 

Red operators still execute adversary behaviors, but transparently and step by step. The blue team examines what was prevented, what was detected, what failed silently, and why. The goal is not to “win” offensively but to validate visibility, tune detections, refine response workflows, and immediately re-test fixes. Purple teaming does not attempt to complete the kill chain; it validates every stage of it so defensive performance becomes evidence-based.

In practice, this creates the real split: penetration testing exposes the path to compromise, while purple teaming closes it through continuous validation.

5.3 How Do You Share Purple Teaming Findings With Executives?

Executives do not need raw telemetry, payload details, or technical walkthroughs. They need clarity, risk context, and measurable progress. Purple teams should translate technical outcomes into business-aligned insights that leadership can act on with confidence.

• Lead with validated risk, not vulnerability volume

Executives care about the few attack paths that matter, not the thousands of theoretical issues. Present the validated weaknesses attackers can actually exploit.

• Communicate in terms of business impact

Map each finding to the assets and functions it affects such as payment systems, patient records, revenue-generating apps, or identity providers. Use simple statements like: “This technique would allow access to high-value accounts.”

• Highlight measurable improvements over time

Show trends that matter:

> Decreased MTTD and MTTR
> Higher prevention and detection rates
> Reduced validated backlog
> Fewer control regressions

Executives want to see a maturity curve, not a snapshot.

• Use MITRE ATT&CK only at a high level

Explain coverage gaps in aggregated terms rather than technique-by-technique detail. For example: “We improved our ability to detect lateral movement techniques by 40 percent.”

• Present outcomes, not tactics

Focus on: what was emulated/simulated, what was discovered, what was fixed, and what is now validated. Avoid technical jargon unless required.

• Convert findings into business-aligned recommendations

Frame actions in terms of operational gain:

> “This fix eliminates a high-risk access path.”
> “This detection tuning reduces incident response workload.”
> “This mitigation lowers the chance of credential theft.”

• Show ROI through efficiency gains

Executives want justification for investment. Demonstrate:

> Hours saved through automation
> Reduction in unnecessary patching
> Lower incident frequency and severity
> Stronger audit readiness and compliance alignment

• Keep the narrative short, direct, and decision-oriented

Provide a concise executive brief with:

> Top three validated risks
> Top three improvements
> Clear next steps and resource needs

• End with assurance backed by evidence

Executives want confidence, not assumptions. Present the validated proof: “What we tested,” “How defenses performed,” and “What is now confirmed to be working.”

How to Leverage AI (or LLM models) in Purple Teaming Engagements?

AI can dramatically speed up purple teaming, but only when used with strict guardrails. Early attempts to “let LLMs generate attacks” proved unsafe: models hallucinated TTPs, invented exploits, and even produced binaries that are taken from real malware (from threat analysis blogs).

As Volkan Ertürk, CTO & co-founder of Picus noted, raw generative AI can become as risky as the threats it tries to emulate.

" ... Can you trust a payload that is built by an AI engine? I don't think so. Right? Maybe it just came up with the real sample that an APT group has been using or a ransomware group has been using. ... then you click that binary, and boom, you may have big problems."

The safer and far more effective use of AI in purple teaming is not to generate attacks, but to organize and interpret threat intelligence. 

Modern platforms like Picus use a multi-agent approach where 

• AI reads a threat report, 
• breaks it down into attacker behaviors, and then 
• maps those behaviors to a trusted, pre-validated library of safe simulation components (like the threat library Picus has been building over 12 years). 

In other words, AI handles the analysis, and the platform handles the execution.

This approach turns a new headline, such as a ransomware campaign or a fresh APT technique, into a complete, safe emulation plan in hours rather than days. Purple teams can immediately test whether their controls would detect or stop the behaviors described in the report, without ever risking real malware or relying on guesswork.

AI is also making purple teaming easier to operate. Conversational interfaces allow engineers to express intent in plain language (“show me any lateral movement exposures”), and the system automatically aligns new intelligence, simulations, and defensive gaps to that intent.

In practice, the value of AI is simple: it shrinks the gap between threat discovery and defensive validation, giving purple teams the speed of generative models without the dangers of letting AI write offensive code. It accelerates analysis while ensuring that only safe, verified simulations run inside the environment.

A Shared Solution: Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) for Purple Teaming

Breach and Attack Simulation is the operational engine that turns purple teaming from a periodic workshop into a continuous, threat-centric validation program.

In most organizations, purple teaming succeeds conceptually but struggles operationally: red uncovers the gap once, blue drowns in unvalidated alerts, and the cycle collapses under manual effort. BAS closes this loop. It gives both teams a shared source of truth, evidence, updated continuously, mapped to real adversary behaviors, and safe to run in production.

1. Providing a Common, Real-Time Truth Layer

BAS continuously simulates real-world adversary TTPs, mapped to MITRE ATT&CKi and scores prevention, detection, and response performance instantly. This eliminates the delays, guesswork, and subjectivity of manual exercises. Both teams operate from the same evidence set: what failed, what worked, and why.

2. Turning Red Team Creativity Into Repeatable Defensive Tests

The biggest value of red teaming, creative attack paths, traditionally evaporates after the report. BAS preserves and operationalizes this knowledge. Red teams can codify custom scenarios, chain techniques, or reproduce threat-group behaviors, which blue teams can then validate continuously.

3. Giving Blue Teams Visibility Into Real Exposure, Not Theoretical Risk

Instead of drowning in CVSS scores or alert noise, BAS highlights the exposures that actually matter:

• attacks that successfully bypass controls,
• techniques that fire no detections,
• misconfigurations or drift introduced silently.

This aligns the purple team around validated prioritization, not lists.

4. Enabling Continuous Purple Teaming at Production Speed

Manual purple teaming is slow, days to script, hours to tune, weeks to repeat. BAS removes this drag. It automates execution, instrumentation, scoring, and reporting so that the cycle becomes:

Attack → Observe → Fix → Validate → Repeat, a rhythm that matches the speed of attackers.

5. Integrating Directly With the Security Stack

BAS validates not just attack feasibility but also the performance of firewalls, EDR/XDR, SIEM, SOAR, WAF, DLP, and email gateways in real time. It shows exactly which controls fired, which stayed silent, and which detections must be tuned.

6. Powering CTEM Programs With Continuous Validation

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework only made alive when validation is continuous and aligned to business objectives. BAS provides the “validate” stage of CTEM, safe, automated evidence that exposures are exploitable, detectable, and remediable, closing the gap between discovery and mobilization.

BAS turns purple teaming into a shared operational practice, not a color, not an event, but an always-on mechanism for improving cyber defense.

Step by Step Real-Life Case Study: Purple Teaming with Picus Breach and Attack Simulation

Picus BAS validates your implemented security controls and strengthens defenses by stress-testing your implemented solutions to identify gaps that adversaries could exploit. 

The platform not only uncovers vulnerabilities across a variety of security measures but also provides both vendor-specific and neutral mitigation suggestions that are ready to implement. This eliminates the need for manual research and rule validation, saving time and effort.

Step 1: Decide on the Threats to Simulate/Emulate 

Picus threat library contains 6600+ threats, which contains more than 27000 attack actions (where a single threat can contain dozens of separate attack attractions). As given above, the attack actions are classified under six different attack vectors, which are;

• Network Infiltration
• Endpoint Attacks
• Web Application Attacks
• E-mail Infiltration
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and
• URL Filtering.

Figure 1. Picus Threat Library

For your purple teaming exercise, you can select from this vastly built threat library, or you can just safely rely on ready-to-run attack templates that are specifically curated for your;

• Threat Profile (based on your sector, like Finance, or region like Southern Italy, etc.)
• Emerging Threats
• Security Control Rationalization, and so on.

Here, at the time we were writing this blog, React2Shell RCE Vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182 and CVE-2025-66478 with CVSS score 10.0 - Critical) were gaining public attention. 

Let us say that at our hypothetical organization ACME, a quick question prompted from the executive: “How secure are we against these vulnerabilities, any business critical risk that can halt our operations?”.

So, you have decided to run a CVE exploitation simulation against implemented security measures; to see how well your WAF is reacting to this kind of exploitation attack (note that Picus Labs promptly included the PoC to Picus Threat Library, so, you can quickly run a simulation). So, without needing to do any personal research by yourself, or testing whether the known PoCs are actually correct, and not fake, you can start the adversarial part of your purple teaming.

Figure 2. Picus Threat Library, Emerging Threats Threat Template

Step 2: Checking on the Simulation/Emulation Result of the BAS Simulation

At this stage, the BAS simulation has completed, and the results are clear: your current WAF did not block the attack. This isn’t a failure of the WAF, your vendor, or your team. It’s simply the reality of facing a new, previously unseen technique that your existing signatures or rules were never designed to detect.

This is exactly why continuous validation matters.

Step 3: Implementing the Mitigation Recommendations

So, the logical next step is to take action based on the mitigation guidance generated by Picus BAS. These recommendations translate the simulation findings into precise, ready-to-apply updates, ensuring your WAF can immediately recognize and stop this attack technique going forward.

In other words, the simulation identifies the gap.

Picus gives you the fix.

And with one click, you can re-test to confirm your defenses now work as intended.

Picus Mitigation Library as for Blue Teaming

The Picus Mitigation Library is a comprehensive repository of validated prevention and detection content that helps organizations strengthen and maintain their security posture. 

Figure 3. Picus Platform Provides Both Prevention and Detection Content

It delivers tailored mitigation coverage for a wide range of security technologies, enabling teams to close exposure gaps quickly and effectively.

The library includes:

• 80,000+ vendor-specific prevention signatures tailored for security controls such as Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and Web Application Firewalls (WAFs).
• 4,400+ validated vendor-specific detection rules and 600+ vendor-neutral Sigma rules for major SIEM and EDR technologies to detect endpoint and network-based attacks.
• Log source recommendations to enhance visibility, optimize SIEM performance, and strengthen detection coverage across the environment.

Figure 4. Picus Platform Detection Content Library

Take a Proactive Approach to Cybersecurity with Picus BAS

Cyber threats evolve every day, your validation must too. 

Picus BAS helps you stay ahead by turning security testing into a continuous, automated, and evidence-driven practice. Instead of waiting for periodic assessments, Picus simulates real adversary behaviors safely in production, showing exactly which techniques bypass controls and how to fix them.

Red Teams gain repeatable attack scenarios, Blue Teams improve detection and response, and Purple Teams accelerate the attack → observe → fix → re-test loop that drives measurable resilience. Every gap is paired with actionable, vendor-specific mitigation guidance, and every fix is immediately re-validated.

If you’re ready to replace assumptions with proof and strengthen your defenses at attacker speed, see Picus BAS in action, request your demo today.