In 2019, hackers stuffed portable network equipment into a backpack and roamed a Facebook corporate campus to trick people into joining a fake guest Wi-Fi network. That same year, they installed more than 30,000 cryptominers on real Facebook production servers in an attempt to hide even more sinister hacking in all the noise. All of this would have been incredibly alarming had the perpetrators not been Facebook employees themselves, members of the so-called red team charged with spotting vulnerabilities before the bad guys do.
Most big tech companies have a red team, an internal group that plots and plans like real hackers would to help head off potential attacks. But when the world began working remotely, increasingly reliant on platforms like Facebook for all of their interactions, the nature of the threats began to change. Facebook red team manager Nat Hirsch and colleague Vlad Ionescu saw an opportunity, and a need, for their mission to evolve and expand in kind. So they launched a new red team, one that focuses on evaluating hardware and software that Facebook relies on but doesn't develop itself. They called it Red Team X.
A typical red team focuses on probing their own organization's systems and products for vulnerabilities, while elite bug-hunting groups like Google's Project Zero can focus on evaluating anything they think is important no matter who makes it. Red Team X, founded in the spring of 2020 and led by Ionescu, represents a sort of hybrid approach, working independently of Facebook's original r ..
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