Geohot, a hacker who was once sued by Sony for reverse engineering the PS3, now works for Google in order to help the company find vulnerabilities in its software.
George ‘Geohot’ Hotz has been employed by Google to be a part of Project Zero, a team of hackers who are ensuring that Google’s software is safe from, um, hackers. Prior to being employed by the company, Holtz was awarded $150,000 by Google for breaking into its Chrome web browser and alerting them to how he managed to do so. This followed his much-publicized hacking of the PS3, where he reverse engineered the console and also released details of his hack to allow others to continue his work in dismantling its innards. Predictably, this led to Sony filing a lawsuit against Hotz, with them eventually settling out of court.
Speaking of Project Zero, Google’s Chris Evans said: “You should be able to use the web without fear that a criminal or state-sponsored actor is exploiting software bugs to infect your computer, steal secrets or monitor your communications.
“Yet in sophisticated attacks, we see the use of “zero-day” vulnerabilities to target, for example, human rights activists or to conduct industrial espionage. This needs to stop. We think more can be done to tackle this problem.
“Project Zero is our contribution, to start the ball rolling. Our objective is to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks. We’re hiring the best practically-minded security researchers and contributing 100 per cent of their time toward improving security across the Internet.”
[Via Eurogamer]
