Context & Threat Landscape of Today’s Banking Security
Banks operate in one of the most frequently targeted and tightly regulated sectors. Recent research shows that 97% of major U.S. banks experienced third-party breaches in 2024, while targeted intrusions against financial institutions increased by 109% year-over-year. That’s why banks need security assessments like adversary simulation and penetration testing to identify risks and build cyber resilience.
Further, banks are under heavy regulatory pressure to maintain strong security and data protection measures.
Frameworks and agencies like GLBA, FFIEC, and NIST CSF require banks to conduct continuous security testing and demonstrate compliance.
Any security breach or failure to comply with regulations can lead to fines, penalties, and reputational damage.
Purple team testing, where offensive and defensive teams collaborate to simulate real attacker behavior, aligns with the operational and regulatory requirements placed on banks. This adversary simulation exercise helps validate a bank’s incident detection and response capabilities.
Overview of the Purple Team Testing Engagement
During a purple team exercise, members of the red team (offensive) and blue team (defensive) work together, sharing insights to identify weaknesses and areas of improvement.
As part of ongoing efforts to strengthen cyber resilience and compliance, the Bank scheduled a purple team engagement aligning with MITRE ATT&CK methodologies. The objective of the purple team testing was to simulate a targeted attack on the bank to identify potential vulnerabilities while validating the effectiveness of in-place controls.
GraVoc’s red team used the same techniques that we have seen leveraged against financial institutions: credential misuse, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and defense evasion. The blue team monitored, analyzed, and responded in real time. Together, we focused on assessing the bank’s ability to detect and contain suspicious activity. The engagement also gave the incident response team an opportunity to test their security controls and strategics under realistic pressure.
The overarching goal of the purple team engagement was to harden the bank’s prevention and detection capabilities.
Results That Strengthened the Bank’s Security Resilience
The purple team engagement produced several measurable and meaningful improvements across the Bank’s security operations. Here is a high-level overview of these results.
- Identified Gaps in Detection and Response: The exercise revealed blind spots in the bank’s SIEM and EDR configurations, allowing the security team to fine-tune alerting and improve visibility into lateral movement and privilege escalation attempts.
- Validated Incident Response Playbooks: Real-world attack scenarios tested the bank’s Incident Response (IR) procedures, confirming which workflows were effective and highlighting areas for improvement, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and respond (MTTR).
- Enhanced Collaboration Between Teams: The exercise fostered stronger communication between offensive (red) and defensive (blue) teams, leading to actionable recommendations and a shared understanding of threat tactics aligned with MITRE ATT&CK.