When 17-year-old George Hotz became the world's first hacker to crack AT&T's iPhone lock in 2007, the companies officially ignored him while they tried to fix the bugs his work exposed. When he later reverse-engineered the Playstation 3, Sony sued him and settled with him only after he agreed not to hack another Sony product again.
When Hotz crippled the defenses of Google’s Chrome operating system earlier this year, the company instead paid him a $150,000 fee for his help in fixing the bugs he had uncovered. Two months later, Chris Evans, a Google security engineer, emailed him an offer: If Hotz wanted to join an elite team of full-time hackers who are paid to “hunt” for security vulnerabilities in every popular piece of software that touches the internet.
Now Google plans to publicly unveil the team known as Project Zero, a group of top Google security researchers with the sole mission of identifying and fixing the most insidious security flaws in various software. These secret bugs, known in the security industry as “zero-day” vulnerabilities, are exploited by criminals, hackers , and intelligence agencies in their espionage operations. By revealing its researchers, Google hopes to fix these bugs.
