Continuous Purple Teaming: Turning Red-Blue Rivalry into Real Defense

Continuous Purple Teaming: Turning Red-Blue Rivalry into Real Defense Sponsored by Picus Security November 6, 2025 10:02 AM 0 By Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security. In many organizations, red and blue teams still work in silos, usually pitted against each other, with the offense priding itself on breaking in and the defense doing what they can to hold the line. However, too often, their efforts don’t meet in the middle, creating noise. The red team runs an exercise, publishes findings, and moves on, while the blue team is flooded with a sea of unvalidated vulnerability alerts and rules. It may seem like progress, but it’s not. The offense identifies gaps once; the defense fights, essentially blind, day in and day out. Purple teaming rewrites this equation. It brings red and blue together, not to compete, but to collaborate, turning testing into a shared process and validation into measurable evidence. The key to making this collaboration far more valuable is Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), which enables real-time, ongoing, continuous validation.  Because the truth is this: attackers evolve faster than defenses can coordinate, and only through continuous validation can we close the gap. Purple Teaming Isn’t a Color Wheel, It’s the Key to Real Cyber Defense Purple teaming isn’t “friendlier red teaming.” It’s a fundamentally more effective workflow, continuously turning every offensive run into a defensive improvement. The workflow goes like this: Red attacks. They emulate adversaries with precision, revealing where defenses hold or give way. Blue responds. They trace which controls fire, which stay silent, and why. Then both go again, fixing, rerunning, and refining until the gaps close. That loop, not the color, is what makes a team truly purple. As Chris Dale, Principal Instructor at SANS, put it during our recent BAS Summit: “I want to see less of this red versus blue. I want convergence. I want us making one another good.” Purple teaming makes that convergence real. Replacing rivalry with collaboration, purple teaming turns testing into an ongoing cycle of validation and improvement. In a field where the stakes are this high and speed and precision can define survival, this isn’t just a better mindset; it’s the only logical way forward. Manual No More: How BAS Powers Continuous Purple Teaming Manual purple teaming is slow. Each new adversary campaign takes hours of scripting, staging, and tuning. By the time a kill chain is ready, new campaigns may already be underway, and your organization might already appear in public reporting. Now you can eliminate that lag, automating the manual tasks that traditionally slow down or stop progress. BAS: Continuously simulates real-world adversaries using TTPs mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework Safely executes simulated payloads against live controls, and  Instantly scores your prevention, detection, and response effectiveness. Here, automation doesn’t replace human creativity; it amplifies it, enabling faster, more accurate validation. As Picus Co-Founder & CTO Volkan Ertürk stressed in the BAS Summit, “BAS is the voltage test of modern security, the current you run through your stack to see what holds.” With BAS, purple teaming stops being a one-off event and becomes a productive rhythm. Attack. Observe. Fix. Validate. 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