What is Purple Teaming in Cybersecurity and its advantages?

Cyberattacks are now happening every 35-40 seconds, up by over 300% increment in the last year alone. There has never been a better moment to focus on your company’s security. An effective security system involves testing, which allows your team to detect and correct weaknesses before they are exploited.

Purple teaming will be the focus of this post, and we’ll show you how it can make penetration testing for digital security even more efficient.

Firstly understand what is Penetration testing?

“Penetration testing” refers to the practice of simulating a cyberattack on one’s own enterprise. In either case, an outside team is hired to look for security flaws in your system, or the company’s own security team is put to the test.
Using pen testing, a security team can discover flaws in their systems that they had previously overlooked. As long as the security team is able to see and understand the hacking process, they can put up barricades to prevent further compromises.

Penetration attempts are typically divided into two groups: the red and blue groups. Both teams are made up of security experts, but their goals are very different.

Attackers are modelled by the Red Team, a group of people who attempt to break into a security system. MITRE’s ATT&CK Framework is typically used to replicate modern hacker attacks by the red team, which selects a number of attack tactics from the framework.

Also Read: 5 Reasons to Learn Ethical Hacking

The primary goal of the red team is to identify any gaps or vulnerabilities in the company’s overall security infrastructure, systems, or specific applications.
Meanwhile, the blue team is acting as the opponent’s defence. This team consists primarily of security engineers who are tasked with responding as swiftly as possible to the red team’s security threat. As a result, they will aggressively protect the system by detecting and attempting to thwart any additional hacks by the Red team.

After the experiment is over, the red and blue teams will compare their findings and identify weaknesses that can be corrected.

Purple Teaming plays an important role

When conducting penetration testing, it is possible to have your digital security teamwork together rather than split into red and blue teams. Purple teaming in cybersecurity is a type of penetration testing in which red and blue teams combine to form a single purple team.

By working together, the blue team will gain a better understanding of the red team’s strategy, allowing them to block them. This method teaches your blue team to recognise and counteract the most common hacker tactics and procedures.

It’ll be interesting to see how hackers adjust their strategies when they learn what the blue team is doing to keep them out. Your digital security team will benefit from the simulation even more if you have a purple-clad crew to work with.

Advantages of purple teaming are as follows:

Purple teaming helps your security team to further develop their security breakthroughs, increasing your digital defences to new heights.

With purple teaming, you’ll be able to take advantage of the following provided below:

• Improved Security Sensitivity
• Enhanced Capability
• Awakening of the Mind

Improved Security Sensitivity

It’s all about teamwork in purple teaming. When two teams work together on the same goal, you’ll get the best of both worlds. As a result of this, both red and blue teams can benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience.
With an external red team hacking into the application, this is especially true.

Getting into your system may take a long time because of their lack of familiarity with your internal structures. Providing the red team with more advanced security expertise from the internal blue team will help them infiltrate more easily.

As a result, the red team can rapidly and efficiently compile a report detailing any system vulnerabilities that may exist. In light of the fact that this is a simulated exercise, your team’s objective should be to identify as many potential security holes as feasible.

Enhanced Capability

There is a good chance that the red and blue teams have been separated into those who are better at guarding systems and those who are more familiar with attacking systems and hacking. This makes everyone’s job easier, but it also prevents them from furthering their careers.

To ensure that both teams benefit from the exercise, you should actively use the purple communication channel. While a defender may be inexperienced with attacking systems, by working with the red team, they’ll learn about the most common routes. In the event that an attack does occur, they’ll be better prepared to protect themselves if they’ve learned how to think like an attacker.

Awakening of the Mind

When it comes to hacking, the MITRE ATT&CK framework is a growing repository of information about common routes that attackers take to gain access to a system. There are 14 columns in this database, each with between 7 and 40 techniques. Your team must do testing on a regular basis to ensure that it is ready for any attack, given the enormous number of possible threats.

By using purple teaming, your red team will be able to communicate whatever attack method they are currently working on using purple teaming. Your blue team can then use this information to design a launched protocol and identify important warning flags for this particular attack.

As opposed to simply being aware that an assault is taking place, the blue team will be better able to document the measures necessary to halt the attack as well as the typical pathway and signs that indicate this particular type of attack is taking place.

Strong, quick, and effective security responses require this degree of awareness.

Conclusion

You can get the most out of your security penetration testing by using purple teaming. Everyone who participates will learn more about different ways to attack and defend. You’ll also find flaws in your own system.
As a result, you can strengthen your company’s digital security and then fix it. It’s time to do something about the ever-increasing number of cyberattacks.