$ cat "Eric M. Gagnon"
Purple Team: The Art of Offensive-Defensive Collaboration in Cybersecurity
Accompanied by Martin Dubé and Nicholas Milot
In an ever-changing threat landscape, the traditional separation between offensive (red team) and defensive (blue team) teams is showing its limitations. The purple team is emerging as an essential collaborative approach to strengthening the security posture of modern organizations.
Join us for this interactive session where we will explore how purple teaming is transforming cybersecurity by fostering synergy between penetration testers and defenders. Our three accomplished experts will share their field experiences, proven methodologies, and lessons learned from real-world deployments of purple team programs.
On the agenda:
- The fundamentals and concrete benefits of purple teaming
- Methodologies and frameworks for effective collaboration
- Case studies: successes, failures, and lessons learned
- How to measure and demonstrate added value
- Organizational and cultural challenges to overcome
- Tools and techniques for operationalizing the purple team
- The future of purple teaming in the face of emerging threats
This dynamic discussion will give you actionable ideas for implementing or optimizing your purple team approach, whether you are a CISO, security manager, or cybersecurity professional looking to evolve your practices.
About the speaker
Eric M. Gagnon
Team Lead, Adversary Simulation - Desjardins
Eric M. Gagnon is a cybersecurity expert with two decades of experience, including more than 15 years as a Blue Teamer, where he has held all key defense roles: vulnerability management, cyber threat intelligence, incident response, and digital investigation. He distinguished himself at Desjardins by founding and structuring the Threat Hunting practice, bringing a proactive capability for detecting advanced threats. From the beginning of his career, Eric cultivated an attacker mindset by obtaining offensive security certifications and participating in numerous CTFs, allowing him to adopt a Red Team approach to better understand and counter adversarial attack techniques. Today, as Team Leader in adversary simulation within the ETTIC team at Desjardins, he fully embodies a Purple Team approach, combining defensive expertise, offensive techniques, and close collaboration between teams to strengthen organizational resilience in the face of emerging threats.