Purple team exercises bring together red teams and blue teams to assess an organization’s defensive capabilities to defend against real-world attacks. Without a standardized purple team exercise framework, however, purple team exercises often suffer from inconsistency in scoping, objectives and reporting making effective evaluation challenging. This makes purple team assessments less effective than they could be.
The Necessity for Standardizing the Purple Team Exercise Framework
A purple team exercise framework is only as good as its scope and objectives. Failing to test people, processes, and technology on the right threats, for example, will often miss significant gaps in cybersecurity detection and response.
A standardized framework focused on real-world threats maximizes the assessment value. It provides an understandable structure, common language, clear objectives, and roles that help organizations measure their security posture more accurately. Also, standardizing the framework allows for more consistent benchmarking to track improvements.
How to Standardize Your Purple Team Exercise Framework
Standardizing your purple team exercise framework requires defining elements such as:
- Scope of testing
- Threat techniques to emulate
- Evaluation scoring methodology
- Data collection
- Analysis and recommendations
- Reporting
Defining these components ensures everyone is committed to the same objectives and using the same metrics to evaluate cybersecurity operations, identify important vulnerabilities, validate security controls, and prioritize recommendations.
Implementing A Standardized Purple Team Exercise Framework
Every organizational framework will look slightly different. It’s important to tailor the framework to organizational needs, goals, and business risks since different industries place a higher priority on certain areas depending on potential risk and harm to the organization. Organizational size, available resources, and industry regulations must also be factored into the equation.
A robust Purple Team framework leverages a combination of threat emulation tools and analytical tools. Threat emulation tools are invaluable in simulating real-world attack scenarios, allowing organizations to test and understand their defenses’ effectiveness under realistic conditions. While analytical tools play a critical role in measuring and assessing the results of these emulations. They provide in-depth insights into the organization’s security stance, highlight vulnerabilities, and identify areas needing the most improvement. These tools, when used in tandem, not only bolster the framework’s efficiency but also empower the organization with actionable data for continuous improvement in their cybersecurity efforts.
For managed security service providers (MSSPs), managed detection response (MDR) providers, and other security-as-a-service providers, the risks are higher as a compromise to your systems can impact large numbers of clients. Further, a standardized approach can create a new customized purple teaming offering that others can’t match in terms of tailorability, impacts, and pricing.
Measuring Results for Continuous Improvement
Once you conduct a purple team exercise, you need to measure the results. The best exercises measure results across all cybersecurity systems: people, processes, analytics, and technology. These measurements identify what’s working, but more importantly, what’s not working to block and respond to threats. It gives you a way to benchmark performance and measure improvement over time. As evolving threats are seen in the wild, frameworks can be updated and refined to expand the testing scope.
Purple teaming should be part of your continuous threat exposure management to produce empiric data about the efficiency of your tech, teams, and processes to quantify risk, detect exposure, and create roadmaps to improve performance.
The Long-term Value of a Purple Team Standardization
The MITRE ATT&CK framework includes more than 200 different cyber threat techniques across various tactics and is frequently updated as new threats and techniques emerge. As cyber threats continue to become more sophisticated and greater in number, purple team standardization is crucial to creating a structured approach to testing cybersecurity maturity, baselining against this standard, and ensuring cybersecurity people, process, and technology continue to perform well.
Purple team standardization provides long-term value through:
- Focusing purple team exercises on real-world scenarios
- Fostering a collaborative approach between red teams and blue teams
- Aligning cybersecurity with best practices and industry compliance
- Producing consistent metrics and reporting for assessments
- Staying current on the ever-evolving threat landscape
MSSPs, MDRs, and other cybersecurity solutions providers benefit from adopting a standardized purple team exercise framework to offer consistent and repeatable purple team exercises to their clients. This assures clients get a comprehensive assessment that aligns with industry best practices.
Predefined processes, metrics, and reporting also allow service providers to scale services more efficiently and demonstrate expertise to assess and improve clients’ security postures. Offering such purple team exercises can also help MSSPs and MDRs expand their security offerings to help grow their business.
Using SightGain for Standardization
SightGain can help automate a standard purple team exercise framework as a catalyst for client improvement. You can map results against a variety of reporting frameworks, including:
- MITRE ATT&CK
- NIST CSF
- CMMC
- ISO 27001
- FFIEC
SightGain has built-in capabilities to measure results against these frameworks to help validate your cybersecurity and uncover gaps that require remediation or additional training. You can also measure competency against National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) principles, measuring analysts’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and tasks (KSATs) against real-world attacks in your production environment.
With continuous testing for purple team results, the SightGain threat exposure management platform provides the insight you need to strengthen cybersecurity, optimize resources, and give the transparency you need to assess security personnel, processes, and technology. In contrast to traditional risk assessment tools, SightGain employs automated assessments for quick access to the essential information you need to enhance security operations and mitigate risk. Schedule a one-on-one demo today and see how SightGain can help improve your cybersecurity.
