Red Team vs Blue Team: Offensive vs Defensive Cybersecurity
The Red Team and Blue Team model simulates cyber battles to test and strengthen organisational resilience. Red Teams emulate attackers — probing systems for weaknesses — while Blue Teams defend in real time, detecting, analyzing, and responding.
This adversarial simulation approach is widely used in penetration testing, SOC operations, and incident response exercises. It builds proactive capabilities, validates detection strategies, and improves collaboration between offensive and defensive security disciplines.
Understanding Red, Blue & Purple Teams
This section is designed to help non-technical stakeholders, students, and early-career professionals understand the different security team roles and how they collaborate to strengthen cybersecurity postures.
We break down each team’s goals, common tools, and tactics, alongside useful frameworks and references to expand your knowledge.
Red Team Objectives
- Reconnaissance: Open-source intelligence, social engineering, and domain enumeration
- Exploitation: Delivery of payloads, zero-day exploitation, credential theft
- Privilege Escalation: Local exploits, lateral movement, and persistence mechanisms
Red teams aim to simulate real attackers using tactics modeled after adversaries from frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK.
Red Team Tactics (Adversary Simulation)
Red Teams mimic real-world threat actors to assess how well an organisation can detect and respond to attacks.
- Reconnaissance: Passive and active information gathering (WHOIS, Shodan, social engineering)
- Initial Access: Phishing emails, drive-by downloads, and USB drop attacks
- Lateral Movement: Exploiting trust relationships, RDP, PsExec, or pass-the-hash
- Privilege Escalation: Exploiting misconfigurations or unpatched vulnerabilities
- Exfiltration & Persistence: Data theft, backdoors, C2 communication using tools like Cobalt Strike
Blue Team Defences
- Detection: Log correlation, anomaly detection, EDR/XDR platforms
- Logging & Monitoring: Centralised SIEM platforms, audit trails, retention policies
- Incident Response: Triage, containment, analysis, recovery, and reporting
Defenders rely on proactive visibility and frameworks like Sigma rules and YARA for threat detection.
Blue Team Tactics (Defensive Operations)
Blue Teams detect, contain, and recover from intrusions using real-time monitoring, threat intelligence, and defensive engineering.
- Asset Visibility: CMDBs, vulnerability scans, and baselining of endpoints and infrastructure
- Threat Detection: SIEMs, EDR/XDR platforms, log correlation, and anomaly detection
- Incident Response: Triage, containment, and eradication using playbooks and forensic tools
- Threat Hunting: Hypothesis-driven investigation to identify stealthy attackers
- Knowledge Sharing: Tabletop exercises, purple teaming, and detection engineering refinement
Purple Team Collaboration
The Purple Team bridges the gap between Red and Blue teams — facilitating knowledge sharing, tuning detection rules, and aligning offense with defense.
- Transforms Red Team findings into actionable Blue Team improvements
- Coordinates tabletop exercises and live-fire simulations
- Validates that detections align with adversary techniques
Purple teaming enhances operational maturity by merging the tactical focus of both sides into a continuous feedback loop.