Your Purple Team Isn't Purple — It's Just Red and Blue in the Same Room
May 11, 2026
Artificial Intelligence / Penetration Testing
Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself. Nobody in that chain is incompetent . Every human is doing their job correctly. The problem is the system, its workflows, and its messy handoffs. In contrast, the attacker's clock has nearly disappeared. In 2024, the mean time from a CVE being published to a working exploit was 56 days. By 2025, it had shrunk to 23 days. So far in 2026, it’s sitting at roughly 10 hours across 3,532 CVE-exploit pairs from CISA KEV, VulnCheck KEV, and ExploitDB. Figure 1. Today’s Vulnerability to Exploitation Windows is now 10 Hours The minor piece of good news is that the defender's clock has accelerated to run in hours . The really bad news is that the attacker's clock has leapfrogged past it and now run...
