Tech

Google’s 'Security Princess' Leads A Team Of Hackers Paid To Think Like Criminals

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Parisa Tabriz
Google's Parisa Tabriz  Twitter / Parisa Tabriz

"Security Princess" is the actual title Google's Parisa Tabriz has on her business cards. 

Tabriz is one of the more than 250 Google security engineers responsible for protecting our user data and the company's infrastructure. In an excellent Elle profile, Tabriz told reporter Clare Malone that she chose the title before a trip to Japan, because she wanted to one-up  the "hired hacker" moniker.   

Tabriz leads a team of of more than 30 engineers who focus on sniffing out and fixing security threats to Google Chrome. She and her team essentially get paid to think like criminals.

"There’s a lot of similarities with the know-thy-enemy part of war," she says. 

She regularly leads "think like an attacker" talks with Google's non-hacker engineers, where she'll prime the group by telling them to concoct ways to hack into vending machines to get free snacks. 

Generally, Tabriz says that when she and her team are doing their job right, you don't even know they're doing it. They'll find holes or security bugs in Chrome, write a fix, and automatically push the updates to all users. Those "silent updates" are happening all the time. 

Learn more about Tabriz by reading the rest of the profile here

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Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco.  She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021.  Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.