How to Use Red Teams and Be a Red Teamer: A Conversation with Mark Mateski

Play Button Pause Button
0:00 0:00
x
Episode Guests
  • Micah Zenko
    Senior Fellow
  • Mark Mateski

Show Notes

I sat down again with Mark Mateski, an expert in red teaming and one of the most insightful people I learned from while writing my book, Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy. In 1997, Mark founded Red Team Journal, a fantastic resource for red teamers and those seeking to learn more about the practice. Mark also gave a presentation at the 2014 Black Hat conference, The Devil Does Not Exist: The Role of Deception in Cyber, which I highly recommend watching.

Mark and I discuss what makes a good red teamer, the importance of an organization’s culture to successful red teaming (and therefore the organization’s success), and Mark’s next book, which contrasts Eastern and Western perceptions of deception and counter-deception. Mark shares his advice for aspiring red teamers, and things you can do right now to become one. We also discussed some of our favorite books, like Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll (which appears on Red Team Journal’s expertly-curated 2017 Red Teamer’s Bookshelf), and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Follow Mark’s Red Team Journal on Twitter @redteamjournal, and listen to my conversation with one of the most thoughtful red team professionals out there.

Politics and Government

I was joined this week by Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and regular contributor to the Washington Post. Professor…

Trade

Senior Fellow Micah Zenko speaks with Temple University Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexandra Guisinger about her new book, American Opinion on Trade: Preferences Without Politics, and how gender and race affect support for trade protection.

Middle East and North Africa

Zenko is joined by Steven A. Cook, CFR's Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies. They discuss Cook's latest book, False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East, and U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa.

Top Stories on CFR

India

The third term win for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was an unsurprising result, but the loss of Parliament seats means his party will need to work with a fragile coalition government to enact polices effectively.

United States

Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.

U.S. Foreign Policy

U.S. administrations have backed sweeping efforts for societal change in the Middle East in recent decades, with poor results. But Washington can still achieve more modest, essential goals in the region.*