In depth
A Purple Team engagement collapses the feedback loop between offence and defence. Instead of a Red Team executing in secret and handing the Blue Team a report ten weeks later, both teams sit in the same room (or the same Zoom) and work through ATT&CK techniques one at a time: the operator runs the technique, the defender watches their SIEM, EDR and network telemetry, and the two teams together decide whether the detection fired, whether it fired with enough fidelity, and whether the response runbook was actionable.
The typical Purple Team agenda walks a prioritised set of techniques drawn from the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise matrix — initial access via phishing payload execution, persistence via scheduled tasks, credential dumping from LSASS, lateral movement via WMI, exfiltration over an encrypted channel. For each technique the operator executes a known atomic test, the defender confirms what telemetry was produced, and if no alert fired the engineering team writes (or tunes) a detection on the spot. The output is a coverage matrix mapped to ATT&CK, a backlog of detection-engineering tickets, and a measurable delta in MTTD between the engagement start and end.
Purple Team is the right service when a SOC has stood up SIEM and EDR but cannot prove how much of the attacker playbook it actually covers. It is also the natural follow-up to a Red Team that scored a hard objective with zero detections — instead of running another stealth engagement, the Purple model accelerates the closing of those gaps. Engagements are short (typically one-to-three weeks), cheaper than a Red Team, and produce tangible artefacts in the form of new Sigma rules, tuned alerts and updated runbooks.
The tooling is mostly open source: Atomic Red Team for technique execution, Caldera for adversary emulation, Sigma for detection-as-code, ATT&CK Navigator for visualisation. See AxVeil adversary simulation for end-to-end engagement framing.
The typical Purple Team agenda walks a prioritised set of techniques drawn from the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise matrix — initial access via phishing payload execution, persistence via scheduled tasks, credential dumping from LSASS, lateral movement via WMI, exfiltration over an encrypted channel. For each technique the operator executes a known atomic test, the defender confirms what telemetry was produced, and if no alert fired the engineering team writes (or tunes) a detection on the spot. The output is a coverage matrix mapped to ATT&CK, a backlog of detection-engineering tickets, and a measurable delta in MTTD between the engagement start and end.
Purple Team is the right service when a SOC has stood up SIEM and EDR but cannot prove how much of the attacker playbook it actually covers. It is also the natural follow-up to a Red Team that scored a hard objective with zero detections — instead of running another stealth engagement, the Purple model accelerates the closing of those gaps. Engagements are short (typically one-to-three weeks), cheaper than a Red Team, and produce tangible artefacts in the form of new Sigma rules, tuned alerts and updated runbooks.
The tooling is mostly open source: Atomic Red Team for technique execution, Caldera for adversary emulation, Sigma for detection-as-code, ATT&CK Navigator for visualisation. See AxVeil adversary simulation for end-to-end engagement framing.