Red Team X is a security team at Meta that is responsible for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in third-party products that could impact Meta's own security. The team acts as a hybrid between a traditional red team, which focuses on probing their own organisation's systems and products for vulnerabilities, and an elite bug-hunting group.

The team was founded by Vlad I. in 2020 when the pandemic and the sudden shift to Work From Home challenged various previously-held assumptions about security.

In his discussion with Pascal, Vlad explains the roles of different security teams within Meta, how they go about prioritising the highest-impact targets to exploit and how they work with vendors to ensure not just Meta but the entire world benefits from the fixes produced.

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Links:

The Diff episode about Velox: https://thediffpodcast.com/docs/episode-17
Risky Business Podcast: https://risky.biz/
RTX Blog: https://rtx.meta.security
RTX Disclosures: https://rtx.meta.security/bugs
RTX in WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-red-team-x-vulnerabilities/

Timestamps:

Intro 0:06
Vlad Intro 1:55
Red Teaming 2:43
Staying up-to-date 6:34
Different team colours 10:02
Defence-in-depth 12:44
Red Team X 15:57
Hardware v Software 19:43
Focus areas 21:29
Prioritising requests 22:44
Notable RTX Disclosures 26:05
Vulnerability disclosure policy 28:52
Getting into offensive security 38:48
Outro 40:51

53: Offensive security at Meta’s Red Team X

Meta Tech Podcast