A cybersecurity exercise, Purple Teaming involves both the red and blue teams to design a more thorough testing routine using a realistic approach. The process intends to create a highly stronger measure against threats and vulnerabilities and provide organizations with much more in-depth assurance.
Using this exercise, Masterstone analyses the TTPs – Tactics, Techniques and Procedures of the attacker. While the red team tries to mimic the TTPs using different scenarios, the blue team aims at improving its capabilities of threat detection and the ways it responds to those threats.
Hence, enabling clients to achieve a more robust and secure architecture aligned closest to the real-world threats.
Red Team’s job is objective-based. They do not just randomly check exploitable vulnerabilities. Instead, they act as aggressors and use various offensive techniques to achieve set goals. Red Teams typically only ever need to identify 1 way of achieving the objective.
Opposite the red team, the blue teams are the defenders. As the name suggests, the blue team take on the job of defending the system from the red team’s attack.
We carry the Purple teaming exercise through the efforts of our Red and Blue teams, carried within an interactive setting.
The red team initiate the attacks and the blue team tries to combat those. Both teams work simultaneously to better understand the business’s overall security capabilities. Later, the teams find out the gaps, improvise their tactics and try the exercise again.
Our methodology at Masterstone is objective-driven and focuses on attaining the best outcomes possible. Even if that requires a few more iterations of the exercise to come to a consensus.
Their task is to stay vigilant and use the required tools and precautions to fight all attacks made by the red team.
To set goals for our exercise, we prepare our teams beforehand. Hence, we set scopes for our testing in order to identify the targeted scenarios.
– Hold meetings with the clients
– Understand their objective for the Purple testing
– Create scopes for the exercise
– Identify targeted scenarios
This is where the attacks happen. Both the team take up their specific roles and carry out their tasks.
– The red team attacks the system and the network while the blue team keeps a watch
– The blue team tries to recognize the tools and tactics of the red team during the exercise
Based on the detection expertise of the Blue Team, improvements are brought into the picture. At the same time, the red team responds by increasing the sophistication of their attacks.
– The blue team detects the attack
– The red team tries to exploit further use cases by increasing the attack’s strength
– If the blue team stops the attack, a small discussion takes place to understand the changes the blue team can include for improving the detection techniques
To attain different perspective for better outlining the possible threats and vulnerabilities, we swap red and blue team frequently to taste the change in attack and defend techniques.
– Swap red and blue teams
The job does not end after just one iteration of the testing exercise. But it gets more complex and thorough.
– The blue team improves the detection tactics while the red team increases the attack intensity
– This iteration continues until there is not much left to exploit
– In the meantime, the improvements are continually analysed
– Once the teams agree that there is no scope to further optimize the use cases, the exercise comes to an end
After concluding the tests, the teams carry out interactive sessions for analysing valuable findings.
– Discuss the findings of the red and the blue team
– Suggest improvements
– Get better idea of where the client’s system and network stand in terms of security