What is Purple Team in Cybersecurity

Excerpt: Working as a bridge between the offensive red and the defensive blue team, the purple team in cybersecurity enhance security and communication working closely with both the teams.

Key Phrase: What is Purple Team in cybersecurity

Everybody has a color that they like, love, or often choose when it comes to buying things, what it invokes in them, and how it makes them feel. Color psychology associates warm colors including red to anger or even comfort. 

While cooler colors such as blue, green, and purple, invoke a feeling of calmness, dependability, and also loneliness. Just like purple is created by mixing red and blue, the purple team in cybersecurity works in coordination with the red and blue team.

Taking how colors are taken by individuals, the cybersecurity world assigned colors to individuals performing various tasks to build better security. 

Understanding the cybersecurity color wheel

To understand what is a purple team in cybersecurity, let’s understand the cybersecurity color wheel. Cybersecurity teams are allocated colors and each colored team is assigned with work in security. For instance, according to the cybersecurity color wheel, the red team work in a company by finding ways to attack the enterprise. This research by the red team helps the IT staff in patching those loopholes from actual cyber criminals. 

Similarly, there are other colors associated with specific hacking-related tasks that internal teams are assigned. This helps in working with a holistic approach where proactive measures are taken to find areas in cybersecurity infrastructure that needs to be fixed. 

While the red team tries to attack the company’s security infrastructure, the information passed on by this team is processed by various teams including the blue team which is also known as the ‘Proactive defenders.’ 

Learning what purple teaming is in cybersecurity

The purple team in cybersecurity works in tandem with the red and blue teams. By bringing in solutions based on the red and blue team’s offensive and defensive hacking attempts, the purple team tests and improves the cybersecurity ecosystem. 

The role of the purple team is not limited to the defensive or the offensive side. It extends all throughout and creates a change in culture and how cybersecurity is addressed. They perform scans to check for vulnerabilities and develop measures on how to prevent threats. 

Role of the purple team in cybersecurity

The purple team in cybersecurity helps detect real-world threats that may affect the organization. Detection Engineering is among the most important functions of the Purple team. They can be hired as in-house staff or on contract from a consultancy for a time limit to have a better understanding of the state of cybersecurity in the organization. 

1. Identify weaknesses in security controls and procedures

2. Create actionable plans to improve the security posture

3. Perform social engineering attacks to see if/how accessing sensitive data is possible

4. Launch malware to identify exposed critical systems

5. Look for and exploit vulnerabilities in software

6. They carry the right logs and results to the teams to build and work on security protocols

7. Analyse data from threats and cyber attacks and help document the details of the attack vector.

8. Working on and implementing a security plan

9. Monitor network for suspicious activities and deploy prevention tools

10. Determining access control and conducting security audits

Not just the defensive and offensive capabilities, the purple team in cybersecurity remains alert about the latest cybersecurity news and threat intelligence. This helps them work on threat-informed detection engineering. 

The purple team in cybersecurity helps identify false positives and build against real threats exploiting vulnerabilities. They engage with the stakeholders to relay the findings and make actionable decisions for the teams to follow. 

Whether one is in the blue team or red, it is the purple team that forms an essential bridge between the both and helps communicate the right cybersecurity messages to each other. They need to be aware of cyber news via cybersecurity magazines, publications, and government news portals to be in the know of what is in and what is out.