I'm often asked about the roles of different security teams. How do Red Teams and Blue Teams interact, and what on earth is a "Purple Team"? I want to be able to explain how these functions collaborate to improve a company's overall security posture without making it sound like they are enemies.
3 answers
Think of it as a continuous feedback loop. The Red Team is offensive; they act like the adversary to find vulnerabilities using ethical hacking. The Blue Team is defensive; they focus on detection, monitoring, and incident response. A "Purple Team" isn't a separate group, but rather a collaborative exercise where Red and Blue teams work together in real-time. The Red Team explains their attack path, and the Blue Team checks if their logs and alerts caught it. This ensures that the company's defenses are actually effective against real-world techniques.
If you're applying for a Blue Team role, how do you show that you're "Purple Team" minded and not just waiting for an alert to pop up in your dashboard?
Red Team attacks, Blue Team defends. Purple Team is just the meeting where they talk about how the attack went and how to fix the gaps.
Well put, Daniel. It's all about the communication between the "hackers" and the "defenders" to make the whole company safer.
Richard, you should talk about "Threat Hunting." Instead of waiting for the Red Team to find a hole, you proactively look for indicators of compromise (IoCs) based on recent threat intelligence. Mentioning that you read the MITRE ATT&CK framework to understand how hackers move laterally shows that you are thinking about the "offense" to better prepare your "defense," which is exactly what a Purple Team mindset is.