Purple Teaming services

What is purple teaming in cyber security?

Purple teaming is a collaborative cyber security exercise that combines offensive testing with defensive improvement.

Instead of running an attack simulation in isolation, purple teaming allows offensive specialists and defensive teams to work together throughout the engagement. The red team performs realistic attacker actions, while the blue team observes, detects, investigates and improves its response.

The goal is not only to identify weaknesses, but to improve detection capability in real time. This makes purple teaming particularly valuable for SOC teams, threat hunters, detection engineers, incident responders and security leaders who want measurable uplift from testing.

A purple team engagement can include simulated adversary techniques, telemetry review, detection validation, SIEM query development, response playbook improvement and control tuning.

Our purple teaming methodology

Every Cyndicate Labs purple team engagement is designed around your organisation’s defensive goals.

We begin by defining the scenarios, threat behaviours and techniques that are most relevant to your environment. These may be mapped to known attacker tactics, industry threats, regulatory expectations or specific areas of concern identified by your security team.

Testing can be delivered through operator-led activity, automated simulation or a blended approach. Depending on your preference, we can work with your defensive team through continuous calls, structured workshops or in-person collaboration.

During the engagement, each action is captured in detail. Deliverables include a granular breakdown of the activity performed, including telemetry, events, commands, actions, results and defensive observations.

This level of detail allows your team to understand exactly what happened, what was visible, what was missed and how detection logic can be improved. Where required, we can support your team with SIEM queries, threat hunting approaches and detection engineering guidance.

Our focus is on building resilient, generic detection logic for attacker behaviours, rather than narrow detections tied to specific tools or easily changed indicators. This helps improve detection coverage against the underlying technique, even when adversaries change their implementation.

When you need purple teaming

Purple teaming is valuable when your organisation wants to move beyond assurance and actively improve defensive capability.

You may need purple teaming if you have a SOC, SIEM, EDR, XDR or managed detection capability and want to validate whether your tools and teams can detect realistic attacker behaviour.

It is also useful after red team testing, following control deployment, during SOC maturity improvement, before regulatory assessments, or when introducing new detection engineering processes.

Purple teaming is particularly effective for organisations that want practical outputs from security testing. Rather than simply receiving a report of what was missed, your defensive teams gain detailed insight into how to improve detection, investigation and response.

Purple teaming vs red teaming

Red teaming and purple teaming both use realistic attacker techniques, but they are designed to achieve different outcomes.

Red teaming is usually covert and objective-led. It tests whether an organisation can withstand, detect and respond to an attack under realistic conditions.

Purple teaming is collaborative and improvement-led. It brings offensive and defensive teams together to observe attacker activity, analyse telemetry, tune detections and improve response capability.

Red teaming is best for measuring resilience. Purple teaming is best for building resilience.

Many organisations use both approaches. Red teaming can identify how well defences perform in practice, while purple teaming helps close the gaps and improve detection capability in a structured, measurable way.