Famous PlayStation Hacker ‘GeoHot’ Offered Top Security Job at Google

George Hotz is something of a hacking celebrity, not only is he famous for unlocking the Apple iPhone, but he’s also the guy who landed himself in big trouble when he jailbroke the PlayStation 3. Yet for all his tinkering and tweaking of commercial gadgets, George is clearly a talented guy at what he does, which is why he’s now doing it on the Google payroll.

Hotz recently discovered an exploit in Chrome, and was rewarded $150,000 for his efforts. Now he has been hired by Google to join a security initiative known as “Project Zero”.

“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,” Said Google’s Chris Evans. “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 looks to reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks and Google is “hiring the best practically minded security researchers and contributing 100 percent of their time toward improving security across the Internet.” Which sounds like a pretty tough job description to live up to. Project Zero’s work will be transparent, with every bug and exploit filed in an external database to ensure vendors and not third parties can resolve issues before they’re used against them.

Thank you Gamespot for providing us with this information.