Purple Teaming

Purple teaming bridges the gap between offensive testing and defensive operations. Traditional red team engagements test your defenses in an adversarial context, and the results arrive in a report weeks later. Purple teaming inverts this model: our red team operators execute techniques in real time while your blue team watches, analyzes, and immediately improves their detection and response capabilities.

The result is not just a report of what we found — it is a measurable improvement in your security posture, documented through before-and-after detection coverage mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Organizations that conduct regular purple team exercises see dramatic improvements in mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and overall SOC analyst proficiency.

Mjolnir's purple team engagements are structured, repeatable, and designed to build institutional knowledge. Every technique we execute is documented, every detection gap is cataloged, and every new rule or signature is validated before the engagement ends.

How Purple Teaming Works

A purple team exercise is a collaborative workshop, not an adversarial engagement. Our red team operators sit alongside your SOC analysts, detection engineers, and incident responders. We execute specific attack techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK matrix while your team observes their tooling in real time. Together, we identify what was detected, what was missed, and what needs to be built.

• Joint planning session to identify priority techniques based on your threat landscape
• Controlled execution of attack techniques with full transparency
• Real-time observation of SIEM alerts, EDR telemetry, and NDR signatures
• Immediate detection engineering — writing and testing new rules during the exercise
• Iterative testing until each technique is reliably detected and alerted

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Every purple team engagement is structured around the MITRE ATT&CK framework, providing a common language between offense and defense. We map your current detection coverage to the ATT&CK matrix, identify gaps aligned to your most relevant threat actors, and systematically fill those gaps during the exercise.

• Baseline ATT&CK coverage heat map before the engagement begins
• Threat-intelligence-driven technique selection based on your industry's top threat actors
• Technique-by-technique execution across initial access, execution, persistence, privilege escalation, defense evasion, credential access, discovery, lateral movement, collection, and exfiltration
• Updated ATT&CK heat map showing improved coverage after the engagement
• Prioritized roadmap for continued detection engineering post-engagement

Detection Gap Analysis

The core deliverable of every purple team engagement is a comprehensive detection gap analysis. For every technique tested, we document whether it was detected, by which tool, at what fidelity, and how quickly. Gaps are categorized by root cause — missing telemetry, absent rules, misconfigured log sources, or insufficient analyst training — so that remediation efforts are precisely targeted.

• Technique-level detection scoring: detected/partial/missed with root cause analysis
• Log source coverage audit — are the right events being collected and forwarded?
• Rule and signature effectiveness review across SIEM, EDR, and NDR
• Analyst response evaluation — did the SOC correctly triage and escalate?
• Detection engineering backlog with prioritized rule development recommendations

Continuous Purple Teaming Programs

Security is not a one-time exercise. Mjolnir offers ongoing purple team programs that test new techniques monthly or quarterly, ensuring your detection capabilities keep pace with the evolving threat landscape. Each cycle builds on previous engagements, progressively expanding your ATT&CK coverage and hardening your environment against emerging adversary tradecraft.

• Monthly or quarterly exercise cadence with cumulative ATT&CK tracking
• New technique introduction based on emerging threat intelligence
• Regression testing to verify previous detections remain effective
• SOC analyst skill development through hands-on exposure to real attack techniques
• Executive dashboards showing detection maturity trends over time