Project Zero is the new initiative announced by Google. The company is hiring the top security experts to make the Internet a more secure place.
“Security is a top priority for Google. We’ve invested a lot in making our products secure, including strong SSL encryption by default for Search, Gmail and Drive, as well as encrypting data moving between our data centers. Beyond securing our own products, interested Googlers also spend some of their time on research that makes the Internet safer, leading to the discovery of bugs like Heartbleed.” states the official announcement from Google.
“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.” wrote Chris Evans from Google’s Chrome security team, the expert that will lead Project Zero.
- Ben Hawkes – an independent researcher from New Zealand which discovered dozens of bugs in many software, including Adobe Flash and Microsoft Office.
- George Hotz – the hacker which become popular for the hack of Sony PlayStation 3, iPhone, Google’s Chrome browser and the recent Towelroot for mobile Android devices.
- Tavis Ormandy – Information Security Engineer at Google and who discovered many zero-day software in many applications.
“We’ll use standard approaches such as locating and reporting large numbers of vulnerabilities. In addition, we’ll be conducting new research into mitigations, exploitation, program analysis—and anything else that our researchers decide is a worthwhile investment.” Chris Evans said.