SERVICES
Purple Teaming
Strengthen detection and response through collaborative, intelligence-driven attack simulations that unite red team operators and blue team defenders to validate real-world adversary behavior.
Why Organizations Need Purple Teaming
Penetration testing and red teaming are effective at identifying vulnerabilities and determining whether an organization can be compromised or detect real-world attacks.
Purple teaming goes a step further. Rather than stopping at findings or outcomes, it focuses on why prevention, detection, and response controls succeed or fail and how to improve them. Powered by the OnDefend BlindSPOT breach and attack simulation platform, purple teaming by OnDefend combines realistic, repeatable attack simulation with direct collaboration between offensive operators and defenders. This approach enables teams to identify root causes, tune detections, refine response workflows, and validate fixes in real time. The result is not just awareness of gaps, but measurable improvement in detection, response, and overall security effectiveness.
TALK TO AN ONDEFENDER
Types of Purple Team Engagements
Attack Simulations
Execute realistic attack campaigns using the OnDefend BlindSPOT technology and manual techniques across systems, identities, and workloads to reflect real adversary behavior.
Manual Adversary Operations
Perform manual adversary actions from an assumed breach position to evaluate detection across critical attack behaviors and techniques.
Results Correlation
Map activity to controls, alerts, and workflows to identify detection gaps, control failures, and operational weaknesses.
Detection & Response Engineering
Design and refine detections, tune alerts, and align monitoring with response playbooks to improve real-world effectiveness.
Reveal the Remaining Risk
Purple team engagements provide visibility into roughly one third of adversary-driven risk by validating detection and response capabilities through collaborative attacker–defender exercises conducted within defined time bounds. While effective for improving tooling, processes, and team coordination, the majority of exposure emerges as environments, identities, services, and trust relationships evolve beyond the scope of scheduled exercises, creating new detection and response challenges over time.
The OnDefend Continuous Security Inspector (CSI) program extends purple teaming beyond discrete exercises to reveal the remaining two thirds of adversary-driven risk. Powered by proprietary technology, threat intelligence, and AI-driven analysis, OnDefend CSI continuously emulates real attacker behavior while validating defensive controls as conditions change – exposing detection gaps, response failures, and control blind spots that only appear as attackers and defenses evolve together.
Giving You The Competitive Advantage
Let OnDefend give you a decisive advantage over adversaries by combining elite operators, deep technical expertise, and intelligence-driven validation, powered by automation that enables continuous improvement within real-world budgets.
Elite Offensive Operators
Purple team engagements by OnDefend are led by experienced offensive security engineers whose backgrounds ensure simulations reflect real attacker behavior rather than synthetic or theoretical testing, validating defensive controls against the techniques adversaries actually use.
Intelligence-Driven Testing
Simulations are informed by a blend of commercial and proprietary intelligence, focusing on the techniques, attack paths, and behaviors most relevant to your threat landscape and business risk, aligning validation to the threats that matter most.
AI- and Automation Enhanced Coverage
Purple teaming by OnDefend is powered by BlindSPOT, the OnDefend proprietary breach and attack simulation platform, with AI-driven automation and analytics extending coverage across complex environments, uncovering hidden risk while reducing operational overhead.
Continuous Testing Capabilities
BlindSPOT enables ongoing validation of detection and response as tools, configurations, and environments change, maintaining continuous assurance without relying on infrequent, point-in-time exercises.
Executive and Technical Reporting
Reporting translates technical findings into business-level insight for leadership while providing defenders with prioritized, actionable improvements, accelerating measurable improvements in detection and response capability.
Narrative Attack Path Analysis
Findings are presented as attacker narratives, showing how techniques are chained together and where detection or response breaks down, providing clear visibility into root cause, detection gaps, and real-world impact.
Collaborative Engagement Model
A dedicated engagement lead ensures clear communication, coordinated execution, and expert guidance from scoping through final debrief, driving clear, actionable outcomes aligned to your defensive maturity goals.
Our Team
Partners with Yours
Purple teaming is inherently collaborative. Our team works directly with your SOC, incident response, and security engineering teams to ensure outcomes align with your operational priorities and business goals.
Resources
Explore our comprehensive resource collection to enhance your organization’s security posture and stay ahead of potential threats.
TikTok Partnership
HaystackID and OnDefend are furthering security of the TikTok U.S. platform & app.
Read ArticlePurple Teaming FAQs
What is purple teaming in cybersecurity?
Purple teaming is a collaborative security exercise where red team attackers and blue team defenders work together to improve detection and response by validating tools, processes, and people during real-time attack simulations.
How is purple teaming different from red teaming?
Red teaming focuses on stealthy, objective-based attacks with minimal defender awareness. Purple teaming emphasizes collaboration and learning, using simulated attacks to directly improve defensive capabilities.
Who should participate in a purple team engagement?
Typical participants include SOC analysts, incident responders, detection engineers, security leadership, and managed service providers responsible for monitoring and response.
Does purple teaming disrupt operations?
Many organizations run purple team exercises quarterly or adopt a continuous model to validate improvements, tune detections, and keep pace with evolving threats.
Can purple teaming be continuous?
Yes. Powered by the OnDefend BlindSPOT platform, Purple teaming can be performed continuously. BlindSPOT automates attack simulation and validation, making continuous testing achievable within budget while maintaining expert oversight and collaboration.
What is BlindSPOT?
BlindSPOT is the OnDefend proprietary breach and attack simulation platform that powers our purple teaming and continuous security validation services. It automates realistic, MITRE ATT&CK–aligned attack simulations and can automatically pull telemetry and results from EDR, SIEM, XDR, and other security tools to correlate attack activity with detection and response outcomes. By combining automation with expert-led purple team collaboration, BlindSPOT enables repeatable, high-fidelity testing at a lower cost than fully manual exercises, making continuous purple teaming achievable within budget while delivering measurable defensive improvement. Learn more about BlindSPOT
Ready to See Your Real Attack Paths?
Contact us to scope your purple team engagement.
