SAN FRANCISCO — Few if any, organizations on the planet operate at the size and scale of Walmart. Scale isn’t just about normal retail operations either; it also comes in play with how the organization handles its own security resiliency testing.
In a session at the RSA Conference here, Jason O’Dell, director of incident response and hunt at Walmart, explained how the world’s largest retailer uses an innovative approach known as purple teaming at scale to improve security and reduce risk.
A Red Team is well-known in cyber-security as a group within an organization that will conduct offensive operations to help identify areas of weakness. A Blue Team, on the other hand, is the group within an organization that is tasked with defending against adversaries and Red Team activities. The Purple Team idea brings Red and Blue teams together.
“Purple is the symbiotic relationship between Red and Blue in a way that improves the security of the organization, constantly improving the skill and processes of both teams,” O’Dell said.
O’Dell said that Walmart began on its Purple Team journey in 2016, and the effort didn’t start well at all for a number of reasons….
