UltraViolet Cyber is the only security operations partner that unifies red, blue, and purple team capabilities into one integrated team, finding what’s vulnerable, stopping active threats, and validating that your defenses hold under real pressure. Its approach brings together threat detection and response, managed services, offensive security testing, and what the company calls the “power of purple,” which connects offensive and defensive security teams to drive continuous improvement. Pulse 2.0 interviewed UltraViolet Cyber CEO Ira Goldstein to learn more.
Ira Goldstein’s Background
When asked about his background, Goldstein shared:
I entered the cybersecurity field through a non-technical path, with a background in political science and economics. Early in my career, I was inspired by the consumer technology revolution to pursue a role in technology.
I started at a reseller and played a key role in the acquisition of a services company. That early milestone in my career opened my eyes to how much implementation, integration and managed services are needed every time an enterprise buys hardware or software.
This led to a drive to work with large companies to help solve security problems through service offerings. For more than a decade, I helped build and lead the services business as COO at Herjavec Group, now known as Cyderes.
Along the way I became a security operations practitioner with an approach that was complementary to my peers in engineering, solving customer problems from a business-first mindset.
How UltraViolet Cyber Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Goldstein explained:
My second company was a virtual CISO and M&A due diligence advisory firm, using what I had learned from the hundreds of security programs I had supported for companies and dozens of M&A transactions.
Having worked in managed security services for so long I know that when security programs mature, oftentimes providers don’t mature with them, and the programs are often limited to defensive security.
Witnessing this ultimately laid the groundwork for founding UltraViolet Cyber, its offensive and defensive services offerings, and the overarching “power of purple” approach we’re executing on today.
Favorite Memory And Milestone
When asked about his favorite memory or biggest milestone working at UltraViolet Cyber, Goldstein said:
My favorite memory at UltraViolet is the most recent acquisition in September 2025, when we acquired Black Duck’s Application Security Testing Services.
Getting to meet and bring on a large, highly talented group of security professionals to add to an already strong team was monumental.
The people aspect of the work we are doing is something I really value and that should not be overlooked.
We now have around 750 security practitioners who want complex problems to solve, and that acquisition was a major milestone that opened the door to even more complex, high-impact work with large enterprises and government agencies.
Core Services And Differentiation
When asked about UltraViolet Cyber’s core services and what makes the company stand out from its competition, Goldstein detailed:
Companies partner with UltraViolet to improve their security and reduce their risk.
On the defensive side of the house, we are responsible for threat detection and response, often in the form of Managed Services. On the offensive side, we’re helping customers uncover risks and threats before they become a problem.
When we’re lucky enough to partner with customers for both offerings, those approaches reinforce one another. We constantly collaborate with customers to help solve and remediate challenges in new ways, especially with AI’s evolution.
When I look at the competitive landscape, typically competitors can’t support the entire end-to-end lifecycle, or approach it as generalists versus security specialists like us.
Working with UltraViolet allows our customers to spend less time and resources solving specific security problems, and more time driving their own business forward.
Defining The Power Of Purple
When asked how he defines purple teaming, Goldstein explained:
“Purple teaming” is a collaborative cybersecurity approach that unites offensive (Red Team) testing with defensive (Blue Team) monitoring.
Instead of acting in silos, the two teams work together in real-time to execute or simulate attacks and instantly tune defensive tools, closing critical security gaps.
Many organizations begin with the most well-understood approach, a “project-based” purple team, that mirrors a typical “red team” engagement but adds in defensive collaboration, real-time response and remediation.
Once companies improve and mature in their pentesting or offensive security programs, they’re often looking for more. They’re missing the real-time detection and defense data.
The power of a purple team is one that helps organizations move beyond point-in-time testing and toward measurable security improvement.
Red And Blue Team Convergence
When asked what red and blue team convergence looks like in practice and how it differs from traditional collaboration, Goldstein said:
In practice, red and blue team convergence reduces the risk inherent in passing off next steps to another team or leaving an issue unresolved.
Instead of the two teams working in silos, a converged approach bakes “purple” behaviors directly into both teams’ work.
For example, on the blue side, taking this converged purple approach goes beyond basic detection & containment. While a traditional response might be, “We detected malware on this asset; isolate the machine,” with purple, the incident is not treated as closed after containment.
Instead, the root cause is investigated, work is done to fix the underlying issue so it doesn’t happen again, and an added layer of continuously validating detections is put in place to ensure controls and alerts are really working.
And on the red side, with a purple approach, it goes beyond “here’s a vulnerability, and here’s how to fix it,” there are steps taken to harden the infrastructure configuration or application design and make the environment more secure.
AI-Driven Security Threats
When asked how the rise of AI-driven applications is reshaping the threats security teams need to prioritize, Goldstein explained:
AI is everywhere in the enterprise, and has completely changed the nature of red and blue approaches.
Historically, these approaches don’t prioritize speed due to IT sprawl and budget or application constraints.
Security leaders are no longer just protecting traditional infrastructure, but they’re also securing AI-enabled applications, APIs, MCP servers, autonomous agents and large volumes of AI-generated code, all of which introduce new vulnerabilities and operational challenges.
As AI increases deployment speed, it means organizations need to actually know how to resolve and remediate threats, rather than only identifying them.
AI’s continuous rise is forcing security teams to rethink what they prioritize; the attack surface is expanding faster than many organizations can secure it.
Combating AI-Powered Adversaries
When asked how integrating adversary simulations with real-time detections better equips teams to keep up with AI-powered adversaries, Goldstein said:
The simple answer to keeping up with AI-powered adversaries is ensuring your security mechanisms evolve at the same pace as the attacks themselves.
AI is massively increasing attacker efficiency; we are seeing better phishing, faster vulnerability discovery, and more automation in every TTP.
The only way to keep up with AI-powered adversaries is to leverage AI-driven defense that’s grounded in real attacker behavior.
With a tightly integrated approach combining red team adversary simulations with blue team real-time detection and response, organizations receive the necessary, continuous feedback loop where real attacker behavior constantly tests and tunes defenses.
It is also critical for the human and the machine to work in tandem within this integrated approach, where AI handles the volume, and humans handle the judgment.
Reducing Alert Fatigue
When asked how uniting red, blue, and purple team capabilities can help reduce noise while improving detection, Goldstein explained:
I think alert fatigue has a few root causes. At its core, it’s a clear sign there is too much happening at once, and teams can’t focus on what’s important — the signal — due to all the noise.
By integrating offensive and defensive operations, organizations can tune detections more effectively, improve signal-to-noise ratio, and focus attention on the threats and risks most likely to impact the business.
When red team activity is tightly integrated with blue team operations, every simulated attack becomes an opportunity to improve detection coverage, reduce false positives, and refine response workflows.
Purple teaming then serves as the connection for teams, helping ensure that findings are operationalized directly into SOC improvements.
This approach helps organizations shift away from static security testing toward continuous validation of what is working in their environment, and what risks are priority.
The Future Of Purple Teaming
When asked how he envisions the “power of purple” approach evolving over the next three to five years, Goldstein said:
Over the next three to five years, we can expect all security approaches to become more “purple.”
The hard divide between red and blue teams will break down in favor of more integrated roles. We will see people who understand the business, understand the technology, and can orchestrate AI-powered tools across both offense and defense.
To thrive in that world, practitioners will need broader, cross-functional skill sets and a mindset that their job doesn’t end when they find a problem; it only ends when they’ve helped deliver the fix.
Future Goals
When discussing UltraViolet Cyber’s future goals, Goldstein concluded:
One of our key goals is to continue to inform our existing customers on “the power of purple.”
As a company, we’re one of the largest, dedicated security services providers in the world. There’s a reason we continue to scale after many years in business, and we’re excited to continue to expand over the next few years and invest more into specific industries, such as broader government reach and our International business.
In addition, an ongoing goal is to keep pace with AI as we become an AI-forward security specialist.
Most recently, we launched Equinox, our proprietary AI detection engineering platform, built and operated by our Threat Intelligence & Detection Engineering (TIDE) team. Equinox was designed to maximize detection coverage across customers’ environments, mapping against both MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE ATLAS, and compressing weeks of detection engineering into minutes.
In addition, we launched Solstice, which is our AI-augmented testing platform, developed based on our expertise and all the tools we’ve used in delivering security outcomes to our customers. Solstice was designed for our practitioners to go faster and deliver a better outcome.
We also recently introduced our inaugural AISec Study, the first practitioner-led benchmark for enterprise AI Security, giving security leaders an evidence-based view of how organizations are actually governing, building and defending AI – we are replacing guesswork with data and giving security leaders visibility into where their AI security programs actually stand.
Overall, our company’s mantra in 2026 and into 2027 is very much human-led, AI-augmented, and we know that will enable our customers to move faster while reducing risk.
