Purple Team Exercise
A red team can show what defenders missed. A Purple Team Exercise helps them fix it. Canary Trap runs adversarial techniques alongside your defensive team to validate coverage, tune detections, and turn observed activity into operational improvement.
What we test, review, and validate.
We test specific adversarial techniques with your defensive team in the loop, so gaps can be seen, understood, and improved while the engagement is still active.
Outcome of this engagement
A Purple Team Exercise helps your team measure detection coverage against relevant adversarial techniques and build durable detections, not just document what was missed.
Technique coverage
- MITRE ATT&CK technique execution by tactic
- Living-off-the-land and EDR-evasive variants
- Coverage gaps mapped to your environment
Detection engineering
- Live tuning of detections with your defenders
- Telemetry validation and source-of-truth review
- Documentation of validated detections
Operational learning
- Response playbook execution
- Cross-team communication and escalation
- Measurable improvement after tuning
Purple team findings your defenders can use.
A Purple Team Exercise is only valuable if it improves what your team can see, investigate, and respond to next time.
Canary Trap reports are written to support detection engineering, security operations, leadership visibility, and measurable control improvement.
Detection coverage should be measured, not assumed.
Security tools can generate plenty of alerts. That does not mean your team sees the right activity, understands it quickly, or knows what to do next.
A Purple Team Exercise gives your team a defensible view of how specific adversarial techniques appear in your environment, which controls detect them, where visibility breaks down, and what can be improved.
A collaborative process from objective to validation.
Every Purple Team Exercise is scoped around the techniques, objectives, defensive tools, telemetry sources, and operational teams involved.
We confirm objectives, target techniques, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, environments in scope, defensive stakeholders, tooling, telemetry sources, communication protocols, timing, and rules of engagement.
We compare offensive activity against what was logged, alerted, investigated, escalated, and understood by your team or MSSP.
Your team adjusts detections, logging, playbooks, or response workflows based on the observed gaps and validated signals.
Where included, we rerun selected techniques or support a structured replay to confirm that improvements are working as intended.
Purple teaming led by people who know the point is improvement.
Purple Team Exercises are often treated like red team lite. That misses the value.
Canary Trap brings senior offensive security expertise, structured collaboration, and practical reporting to help your defensive team improve detection coverage and response quality against relevant adversarial techniques.
Senior-led execution
Testing is led by experienced offensive security professionals, not handed off to junior operators following a script.
Collaborative defensive improvement
We work with your defenders, internal SOC, or MSSP to connect offensive activity to telemetry, alerts, investigations, and playbooks.
Technique-driven testing
Engagements are scoped around relevant tactics, techniques, and behaviors, with MITRE ATT&CK mapping where useful.
Detection-focused reporting
Findings show what was executed, what was seen, what was missed, and what should be tuned.
Practical knowledge transfer
The engagement helps defenders understand the activity, not just receive a post-engagement report after the useful learning moment has passed.
Project management
Every engagement includes clear communication, defined expectations, stakeholder alignment, and controlled escalation paths.
Validation
Validation helps confirm that improved detections or controls are working, not just documented.
Trust signals
Canary Trap is SOC 2 Type II certified, maintains an NPS above 95, and specializes in offensive security testing.
Purple team value grows when it connects to broader validation.
Purple Team Exercises often build on earlier testing or lead into more focused defensive improvement. These are common pairings.
Purple team exercise questions, answered plainly.
A Purple Team Exercise is a collaborative security testing engagement where offensive testers and defensive teams work together to validate detection coverage, tune controls, and improve response to specific adversarial techniques.
Canary Trap runs approved techniques with your defenders involved so your team can see what was executed, what was detected, what was missed, and what should improve.
They are closely related. “Purple teaming” describes the collaborative practice of combining red team offensive techniques with blue team defensive improvement. A Purple Team Exercise is a structured engagement that applies that practice to defined objectives, techniques, tools, and teams.
Red teaming usually measures realistic adversarial behaviour with limited defender awareness. Purple teaming is collaborative. The offensive and defensive teams work together so detections, telemetry, playbooks, and response workflows can be improved during or immediately after the exercise.
Ideally, yes. A Purple Team Exercise is most valuable when there is a defensive team, SOC, MSSP, or security operations function that can observe, investigate, tune, and validate detections.
If detections are managed by an MSSP, Canary Trap can include them in the engagement where agreed.
Yes. Purple Team Exercises are often scoped and reported against MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques relevant to your environment, defensive goals, and threat model.
Techniques may include credential access, execution, persistence, privilege escalation, lateral movement, command-and-control, defense evasion, discovery, data access, and other approved activity relevant to the environment.
Final technique selection is confirmed during scoping.
Testing is coordinated with your team and run in controlled windows. Canary Trap confirms rules of engagement, communication paths, and safety boundaries before activity begins.
Yes. A Purple Team Exercise is often most valuable after a Red Team Exercise because it turns observed red team activity into durable detections, improved playbooks, and stronger defensive understanding.
Yes. Purple teaming can help validate whether SIEM, EDR, logging, alerting, and telemetry sources are capturing relevant adversarial activity and whether detections need to be improved.
Yes, where agreed. If an MSSP manages detection or response, Canary Trap can coordinate with them during the exercise so activity, telemetry, and tuning are aligned.
Most Purple Team Exercises take one to three weeks, depending on the number of techniques, tuning depth, environments in scope, defensive stakeholders, and whether validation or replay is included.
Yes, in many cases. Purple teaming can be a better starting point if your goal is to improve detection coverage and response workflows before measuring them in a less transparent red team scenario.
Yes. A Purple Team Exercise can support governance, customer assurance, audit, insurer, and leadership conversations by providing evidence of detection coverage, response improvement, and control validation.
Scoping typically requires defensive objectives, environments in scope, tools and telemetry sources, detection priorities, relevant MITRE ATT&CK techniques, SOC or MSSP involvement, communication protocols, and timing.
A scoping call is used to confirm the right approach before work begins.
Canary Trap reviews the findings with your team, explains what was executed and observed, provides detection and remediation guidance, and can support replay or validation activities where included.
Ready to scope a Purple Team Exercise?
A short scoping call is enough to align on your detection goals, environment, defensive stakeholders, tooling, timing, and the right next step.
Working toward detection improvement, SOC maturity, customer assurance, or a red team follow-up? Tell us what you need to prove and we’ll work backwards from it.
