Offensive and Defensive Security

In contrast, defensive security measures are focused on seeking out the perpetrators and in some cases attempting to disable or at least disrupt their operations. Defensive activity focuses on reactive measures, such as patching software and finding and fixing system vulnerabilities.

Red Team engagements are focused on objectives previously defined and validated by the client. This exercise is a simulated attack attempt to test how an organisation's security team responds to cyber threats. During the test, the team focuses on the pre-defined mission objectives, seeking to access sensitive information on multiple fronts and avoiding detection by the client.

As such, the process usually involves more people than a standard penetration test. By spending more time on the reconnaissance phase and with more resources, the results found by a Red Team can lead to a deeper understanding of the level of risk to the organization.

A Blue Team exercise is an attack simulation that focuses primarily on the effectiveness of a defence team and its ability to detect, block and minimise cyberattacks. These exercises simulate threats that have the potential to cause significant losses to an organisation. During the exercise, a Red Team simulates attacks targeting the organisation's infrastructure to exploit vulnerabilities in systems and applications on the network.

The objective of the Blue Team is to respond to the attacks by launching appropriate countermeasures to isolate the infected assets and generally thwart the attack. At the end of the exercise, the Red Team will discuss their attack methods and actions so that the Blue Team can confirm their findings and then identify and correct the missed attacks.

Purple Teaming is an exercise where Red and Blue teams work closely together in a pre-defined exercise to improve their capabilities to prevent and detect cyber-attacks, through continuous feedback and knowledge transfer. The Red team exercise simulates multiple types of attack throughout the engagement, launching the attack and waiting for the Blue Team to detect and respond. It identifies any weaknesses or gaps in detection and response and provides insight on how the issue can be remediated.

The result is actionable improvement to your defensive capabilities against real-world threats. Purple team exercise provides an excellent return on investment by helping you maximize the value of existing defensive controls.