A purple teamer is a cybersecurity professional who works to bridge the gap between red teams (offensive security) and blue teams (defensive security). Their role involves fostering collaboration and ensuring that both teams’ efforts align to enhance an organization’s security posture.

Here are some key aspects of what a purple teamer does:

1. Facilitating Communication: Purple teamers act as intermediaries, ensuring that insights and findings from red teams are effectively communicated to blue teams and vice versa. This helps both teams understand each other’s strategies and work together more effectively.
2. Collaborative Exercises: They organize and participate in collaborative security exercises, such as attack simulations and tabletop exercises, where red and blue teams work together to identify and address vulnerabilities.
3. Continuous Improvement: Purple teamers focus on continuous improvement by evaluating the effectiveness of security measures, identifying areas for enhancement, and implementing best practices from both offensive and defensive perspectives.
4. Threat Intelligence Sharing: They facilitate the sharing of threat intelligence between teams, helping blue teams stay informed about the latest attack techniques and enabling red teams to test defenses against realistic threats.
5. Holistic Security Approach: Purple teamers take a comprehensive approach to security, ensuring that offensive and defensive strategies are integrated and optimized to protect the organization.
6. Metrics and Feedback: They use metrics and feedback to assess the effectiveness of security measures and provide constructive recommendations for improvement.
7. Training and Development: Purple teamers often conduct training sessions and workshops to enhance the skills and knowledge of both red and blue team members.
8. Ethical Responsibility: They ensure that all activities are conducted ethically, legally, and with the organization’s consent.

By combining the strengths of red and blue teams, purple teamers play a critical role in creating a more resilient and effective security posture for organizations. Purple Teamers tend to be in organizations with a higher level of cybersecurity maturity and management. Purple Teamers often have to know offensive and defensive techniques on top of communication and management skills.