How Often Should You Run Purple Team Exercises? A Practical Guide for CISOs

Cyber threats are constantly changing. Attackers are constantly evolving their attacks to circumvent security systems. For this reason, organizations are no longer able to depend on annual security testing. Instead, security leaders need to continually test their teams to see how well they are able to detect and respond to threats. For this reason, many CISOs are now opting to run purple team exercises.

A purple team exercise is a combination of an offensive and a defensive team. The red team prepares scenarios and attacks, while the blue team is responsible for detection and response. They act together to enhance the organization’s security situation on the go. But one question remains with the many CISOs: How many times should you do these exercises?

It depends on risk, compliance, infrastructure, and security maturity, among other things. However, each organization must have a realistic timeline that considers the cost of operations and how secure they are willing to make the environment.

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Why Organizations Need to Run Purple Team Exercises Regularly

Cyberattacks today are extremely fast-paced. Thus, it is important for organisations to continuously test their defenses and not rely on static defenses. Companies that conduct a lot of Red Team exercises find out how to exploit the weak points before the attackers.

Purple Teaming is not a traditional penetration test, but rather is about collaboration between offensive and defensive teams. Defenders are thus able to learn about attacks that appear within their own environment. This enhances the visibility, detection accuracy, and incident response.

Furthermore, exercising regularly has the following benefits for organizations:

• Make sure SIEM and EDR are effective
• Reduce the time spent on incident response procedures
• Minimize detection times and response times.
• Identify monitoring gaps
• Improve cross-team communication

Most importantly, there is a culture of continuous improvement with regular purple teaming. Security teams are proactive, rather than reactive, in strengthening security. 

Real Life Example:

In 2021, Ransomware attacks have been carried out through the Kaseya supply chain for the past couple of weeks, highlighting the need for organisations to test their detection and response capabilities regularly via purple teaming exercises. 

How Often Should CISOs Run Purple Team Exercises?

Each organization does not have a set schedule. Most developed security programs, however, are run quarterly or monthly based on their risk level and are conducted by the run purple team.

A monthly Purple team Exercise is held.

For firms with a high-risk environment, drills should be done monthly. The following schedule is appropriate for:

• Financial institutions
• Healthcare organizations
• Government agencies
• SaaS providers
• Critical infrastructure companies

Constant attacks and strict compliance requirements that these industries have to adhere to. Thus, teams need to be ready for new threats every month with monthly exercises. Also, new cloud deployments or infrastructure are a great benefit to frequent testing.

Quarterly Purple Team Exercises will now be held.

Some organizations like to do quarterly exercises due to the fact that it can help balance the amount of work on the operation, with the value of making valuable security improvements. Companies can get a clear view of detection gaps whilst exercising Purple Team every quarter without overloading their internal teams.

For organizations that already have: Quarter exercises are particularly effective when:

• Mature SOC operations
• Stable infrastructure
• Reliable monitoring systems
• Effective plans are in place to respond to incidents

In addition, the teams have enough time in between sessions to address problems that they have identified in the prior session.

Real Life Example:

CrowdStrike customer case studies show that organizations using continuous threat validation and collaborative detection exercises improved visibility against insider threats and cross-domain attacks. 

Factors That Determine Exercise Frequency

The frequency of organizations’ purple team engagements is a function of various factors.

Industry Risk Level

Test frequency depends on the industry being tested and the level of its specificity. Phishing, ransomware, and credential theft attacks are common in the banking sector, for instance. Thus, they have to continually justify their defenses.

For smaller businesses that aren’t exposed to a lot, they might need to have them less often, at first.

Compliance Requirements

Numerous regulatory measures promote ongoing security validation. So, those needing to be compliant with strict standards may require periodic purple team reviews.

It’s important to remember that compliance should not be the main driver of the strategy, but it does have an impact on testing frequency.

Infrastructure Changes

Organizations should deploy major infrastructure changes and run purple team exercises to test new security controls as soon as possible.

Migration to the cloud, remote working, and network redesigns all present new challenges. Changes in the market, therefore, make it necessary to conduct testing after the change.

Security Team Maturity

Immature security programmes typically need more regular exercises, due to a higher number of visibility gaps.

But for more sophisticated SOCs that have developed more tooling, they may be more concerned with tuning or optimizing detections rather than creating new ones. 

Common Mistakes CISOs Make With Purple Teaming

Purple teaming is a common practice among many organizations, but they aren’t getting the best results due to poor planning.

Do not consider Purple Teaming a One-Time Activity!

Some companies do one exercise and think that they are safe after the exercise. This, of course, is not effective in addressing cyber threats, which are constantly changing and advancing.

Organizations should continually run purple team exercises as attackers are constantly coming up with new methods.

Uses only a specific tool

While technology is important, it’s not enough to keep environments secure. It’s also important to assess people, processes, and communication flows as part of purple teaming.

If not, there’s a risk that the weaknesses in the operations will go unnoticed and will become an attractive area for an attack.

Ignoring Metrics

The improvement measures from each engagement need to be tracked in terms of security leaders. If there are no metrics, CISOs have no way of proving progress or how to justify investments.

Useful metrics include:

• Mean time to detect
• The average response time is the mean time to respond.
• Detection coverage
• Alert accuracy

Understand and apply Unrealistic Attack Scenarios

Exercises should be a realistic threat in a manner that is relevant to the organization’s industry. The scenarios are generic and do not represent attacker behavior.

Instead, companies should rely on the most current threats and strategies of known attackers when simulating attacks.

Sophos’ 2024 State of Ransomware Report gives average ransomware recovery costs as $2.73 million, making it more important than ever to have purple team exercises so that organizations can be more cyber resilient. 

Building an Effective Purple Team Schedule

They can’t just select random testing dates and expect to have an effective program. Security programs must have a blueprint for CISOs to follow that balances security objectives with operational capacity.

Start With a Baseline Assessment

Organizations need to assess the level of security maturity before it begins to run a purple team regularly.

This evaluation will be used to determine the most important gaps to address and test goals.

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Define Clear Objectives

Each exercise should be aimed at a particular target, including:

• Testing ransomware detection
• Validating phishing response
• Evaluating cloud monitoring
• Web access indicators and visibility of lateral movements;

Having clear goals makes things more efficient and easier to gauge results.

Conclusion

No one schedule will work for every organization. But most companies should perform Purple Team exercises on a quarterly basis, and high-risk companies may perform them monthly or continually.

In the end, organisations that regularly conduct Purple Team engagements will have better defenses, quicker reaction times, and improved readiness to withstand real-world attacks. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the ideal frequency for purple team exercises?

To ensure that most organizations perform purple team exercises quarterly. But some of the high-risk industries may have monthly or continuous engagements. 

2. Why should companies run purple team exercises regularly?

Through regular exercises, organizations can test security controls, enhance threat identification, bolster security response efforts, and uncover gaps that they can use before a threat is exploited. 

3. Can small businesses benefit from purple teaming?

Yes. Running Purple Team exercises benefits even the smallest of organizations as the process helps them be more visible, detect accurately, and be prepared for incidents.