Red team, purple team, and blue team get thrown around a lot in security and they are not interchangeable. Each has a different job. Choosing the right one depends on what you are trying to improve: unvarnished attack simulation, detection and response, or both. Here is how they differ and when to use red teaming services, purple team exercises, or blue team focused work.
What Is a Blue Team?
The blue team is your defensive side: SOC analysts, incident responders, security engineers, and anyone focused on detecting and responding to threats. Blue team activities include:
- Monitoring and alerting.
- Tuning detection rules and reducing false positives.
- Investigating incidents and containing attacks.
- Hardening systems, patching, and configuration management.
Blue team is business as usual defense. They do not simulate attacks; they react to them and improve defenses over time.
What Is a Red Team?
A red team is an adversarial simulation. Red teamers act like real attackers: they are stealthy, goal oriented, and not there to help you fix things during the engagement. Their job is to find out whether your people, processes, and technology would actually stop or catch a determined adversary.
Red teaming services typically include:
- Realistic attack scenarios.
- Use of social engineering, penetration testing, and sometimes physical scenarios.
- No hand holding: the red team does not tell defense what they are doing until after the exercise.
- Measured outcomes: did you detect them? How long did it take? Could they reach their objective?
Red team answers: If a real attacker came after us, would we see them and stop them? It is the most realistic stress test you can run.
What Is a Purple Team?
Purple team sits between red and blue. In a purple team engagement, offensive and defensive sides work together. Attack techniques are run in a controlled way so the blue team can validate and tune detections and close gaps in near real time.
Purple team exercises typically include:
- Running specific adversary techniques with defenders watching.
- Checking whether existing alerts fire and whether they are actionable.
- Tuning rules, reducing false positives, and adding coverage where it is missing.
- Shared language and outcomes: both sides win when detection and response get better.
Purple team is ideal when you want to improve detection and response quickly, without the full stealth and scope of a red team. It is collaborative, not adversarial.
Red vs Purple vs Blue: Quick Comparison
| Blue team | Purple team | Red team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Defend, detect, respond | Improve detection and response | Simulate real attacker |
| Style | Defensive operations | Collaborative exercises | Adversarial, stealthy |
| When | Ongoing | When maturing detection | When you want an unbiased attack test |
| Output | Alerts, incidents | Tuned detections, gap list | Attack narrative, findings |
When to Choose Red Team
Use red teaming services when you want:
- An unbiased view of how well your organization would fare against a real attack.
- A full scope scenario.
- Executive or board level evidence of security posture.
- To test people, process, and technology together under realistic conditions.
Red team is the right choice when the question is would we actually catch a real attacker? not do our detections work in a lab?
When to Choose Purple Team
Use purple team when you want to:
- Improve detection and response without a full red team engagement.
- Validate that detections fire for specific techniques.
- Reduce false positives and tune rules with real attack data.
- Give red and blue teams a shared, structured way to work together.
Purple team is the right choice when you are building or maturing detection and want to close gaps quickly with direct feedback.
When to Rely on Blue Team
Blue team is your day to day defense. It does not replace red or purple; it benefits from them. Use red and purple team outcomes to:
- Prioritize what the blue team should harden or monitor next.
- Validate that new detections work before assuming you are covered.
- Train analysts with realistic scenarios and outcomes.
Think of blue as the team that owns defense; red and purple are how you stress test and improve that defense.
How They Fit Together
A mature program often uses all three:
- Blue team runs defense every day.
- Purple team exercises improve detection and response.
- Red team engagements test the whole organization against a realistic adversary.
If you are not sure where to start, a common path is: run a purple team assessment to tune detection and close obvious gaps, then schedule a red team to see how you hold up when the red team is not helping. Need help scoping red vs purple for your organization? Contact us to discuss.