Combined Red and Purple Team for a SaaS Platform

October 5, 2025
red-teampurple-teamcloudkubernetes

Challenge

A fast-growing SaaS company needed to validate the security of their multi-tenant cloud architecture before onboarding enterprise customers. Their development team had built security controls, but they had never been tested against realistic attack scenarios.

Approach

Crimson7 executed a combined engagement starting with red team testing followed by collaborative purple team exercises:

  • Red team phase: targeted the multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture, AWS IAM policies, and CI/CD pipeline
  • Identified critical findings and transitioned to purple team mode
  • Purple team phase: worked with the engineering team to build cloud-native detections
  • Provided architectural recommendations for defense-in-depth improvements

Results

The red team phase uncovered a tenant isolation bypass in the Kubernetes namespace configuration that could have allowed cross-tenant data access. During the purple team phase, 35 cloud-native detection rules were developed for AWS CloudTrail and Kubernetes audit log analysis. Architectural recommendations reduced the overall attack surface by 40%.