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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos Red Teams and Blue Teams
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Red Teams and Blue Teams

Red team/blue team operations pit offensive security professionals against defensive teams to test and strengthen an organization's security posture. Purple teams can also serve as a coordination layer between the two.

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About this video

Red team/blue team operations formalize the adversarial dynamic at the heart of penetration testing by assigning distinct roles to offensive and defensive security professionals. The red team takes on the attacker role, actively attempting to exploit vulnerabilities, move laterally through a network, and achieve unauthorized access. The blue team is responsible for defending against those efforts, detecting intrusions, and maintaining the integrity of the environment. Labeling these groups gives organizations a clear framework for structuring security testing and measuring defensive effectiveness against realistic attack scenarios. Depending on the size and maturity of an organization's security program, red and blue teams may function as permanent internal departments engaged in continuous adversarial testing, or they may come together for scheduled exercises designed to stress-test defenses and surface gaps. These exercises serve as significant learning opportunities, helping both sides better understand the network and improve overall security. Similar competitive events are also held at professional conferences, where participants are assigned to teams and work through structured challenges in a contest format. Effective red team/blue team operations depend on communication and coordination between the two sides. In some models, offensive and defensive practitioners work in close proximity, sharing findings in near real time. In others, a purple team serves as a dedicated coordination function between red and blue, ensuring that attack activity and defensive responses are aligned and that insights from engagements translate into concrete security improvements. The term purple reflects the blending of the two primary team colors and the collaborative intent behind the role.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Red Team Blue Team Concept

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
1.1 Compare and contrast various types of security controls.
5.5 Explain types and purposes of audits and assessments.
CompTIA CySA+
3.1 Explain concepts related to attack methodology frameworks.
1.5 Explain the importance of efficiency and process improvement in security operations.
EC-Council CEH
1.1 Introduction to Ethical Hacking
ISC2 CISSP
6.1 Design and validate assessment, test, and audit strategies
6.2 Conduct security control testing
NIST CSF
ID.IM-02 Improvements are identified from security tests and exercises, including those done in coordination with suppliers and relevant third parties.

Key terms

Penetration Testing
An authorized simulated attack on a system to identify and evaluate security vulnerabilities.
Red Team
The offensive security team responsible for simulating attacks and attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in a network or system.
Blue Team
The defensive security team responsible for protecting systems and networks against attacks, including those simulated by a red team.
Purple Team
A coordinating function or team that facilitates collaboration and communication between red and blue teams to improve overall security effectiveness.
Vulnerability
A weakness in a system, application, or process that can be exploited by a threat actor.

Topics

Red Team Blue Team Purple Team Penetration Testing Security Operations Cybersecurity

Transcript

One thing that takes pen testing to the next level is red teams and blue teams.

The concept is really quite simple. You have two teams, an offensive team and a defensive team. When you're playing offense, you're the pen tester, you're the hacker, you're the one trying to exploit vulnerabilities to get into the network and then leverage it somehow. When you are the defensive team, you're trying to guard against that, you're trying to keep that offensive team out of your network. All we've done is just put labels to it: you have the offensive team, who is the red team, and the defensive team, who is the blue team.

Teams inside a company

Now if your company is large enough and they have a big enough security department, they might have a full department that's just the red team, or a team of people within the department that's just the red team. They're constantly trying to hack into the network, trying to find vulnerabilities, trying to do whatever they can to get into the network. The blue team then is everybody else, who's trying to guard against that from happening.

Red team blue team events

There are also red team blue team events. Perhaps what you do in your company is you just have an exercise where you split them into red teams and blue teams and then you pit them against each other. It's a great way to explore the network and figure things out on your network, and it's a big learning opportunity for everybody involved in the company to become more secure.

Also, if you go to a conference, they'll have red team blue team events where they have some sort of challenges and you're put on a team, and then you're doing the same thing, you're carrying it out, but it's just more of a contest type of thing. So there are different events out there that will carry out these red team blue team events.

Purple teams

Now there does need to be some communication that happens between the offensive team and the defensive team. So perhaps you have an integrated team, where both of them are working side by side, one to hack and one to be able to defend against that. The other thing you might have is a purple team. That purple team is the go-between for these two teams, to make sure that they're coordinated and that overall things are running smoothly. So that's another team that could be involved here, and it's purple just because that's red and blue combined.

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