A famous jailbreaker has joined Google’s internet protection team

A couple of days ago, Google announced Project Zero which is basically Google’s plan to keep the internet safe. This is done by keeping an eye out for potential vulnerabilities across all sorts of software and platforms, and then helping the developers plug it up before it gets out of hand and something bad happens. To do that, Google would have to put together a dream team of hackers, and it seems that one of those hackers has been revealed to be none other than George Hotz, who also goes by the handle geohot. For those unfamiliar with Hotz, he was the first person in the world to jailbreak the iPhone back in 2007 at the age of 17, and has since gone on to release several more jailbreaks and hacks, one of which involved the PlayStation 3 which landed Hotz in a spot of trouble with Sony.

When 17-year-old George Hotz became the world’s first hacker to crack AT&T’s lock on the iPhone in 2007, the companies officially ignored him while scrambling to fix the bugs his work exposed. When he later reverse engineered the Playstation 3, Sony sued him and settled only after he agreed to never hack another Sony product. When Hotz dismantled the defenses of Google’s Chrome operating system earlier this year, by contrast, the company paid him a $150,000 reward for helping fix the flaws he’d uncovered. Two months later Chris Evans, a Google security engineer, followed up by email with an offer: How would Hotz like to join an elite team of full-time hackers paid to hunt security vulnerabilities in every popular piece of software that touches the internet? Today Google plans to publicly reveal that team, known as Project Zero, a group of top Google security researchers with the sole mission of tracking down and neutering the most insidious security flaws in the world’s software. Those secret hackable bugs, known in the security industry as “zero-day” vulnerabilities, are exploited by criminals, state-sponsored hackers and intelligence agencies in their spying operations. By tasking its researchers to drag them into the light, Google hopes to get those spy-friendly flaws fixed. And Project Zero’s hackers won’t be exposing bugs only in Google’s products. They’ll be given free rein to attack any software whose zero-days can be dug up and demonstrated with the aim of pressuring other companies to better protect Google’s users.