Purple team exercises are collaborative security assessments where offensive (red team) and defensive (blue team) practitioners work together in real time to test, validate, and improve an organization's detection and response capabilities. Unlike traditional red team engagements where the blue team is unaware of the exercise, purple team operations are transparent and collaborative, with both sides sharing information to maximize learning and defensive improvement. The goal is not to test whether the blue team can detect attacks, but to ensure they can and to fix gaps immediately when they cannot.
Purple team exercises follow a structured framework. The red team selects attack techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK matrix based on the organization's threat profile. Each technique is executed while the blue team monitors in real time. For each test, the team evaluates: did the attack generate telemetry, did detection rules fire, did alerts reach the SOC, and could the blue team investigate and contain the simulated threat. When gaps are identified, the team collaborates immediately to develop or tune detection rules, update playbooks, and verify the fix works. Results are documented in a detection coverage matrix mapping ATT&CK techniques to detection status. Exercises can range from single-day focused sessions testing specific techniques to multi-week campaigns covering entire kill chains.
Traditional red team engagements produce a report of findings weeks after the exercise, often revealing gaps that the blue team cannot address until the next budget cycle. Purple team exercises provide immediate feedback and remediation, compressing the improvement cycle from months to hours. They build mutual understanding between offensive and defensive practitioners, breaking down organizational silos. The detection coverage matrix produced by purple team exercises provides the most accurate assessment of an organization's actual detection capability against specific adversary techniques.
Purple team exercises are central to CDA's C-DRILL campaign tier in the TID domain. Our approach maps exercises to the specific APT groups targeting the client's industry, ensuring that tested techniques reflect realistic threats. CDA operators function as an integrated purple team, combining offensive expertise with defensive engineering to produce immediate, measurable security improvements. The Arena awards points for purple team missions based on the number of detection gaps closed.