Google's security princess
The woman who defends the search giant from
hackers has little time for official titles
When Parisa Tabriz was a child, she would boss
over her little brothers. She would beat them at games on the field or on the
console. As they grew older, she found herself unable to outdo them physically,
so she looked for other ways to beat them. She wasn't sure how to, so she took
a school test designed to help children find which jobs they were best suited
for. She got `police officer'. “I laughed at the time but I realise now it
wasn't all that far off; after all I'm in the business of protecting people,“
she tells The Telegraph's Josie Ensor. Tabriz leads a team of hackers and
spends every day trying to find weaknesses in Google Chrome, the world's most
popular browser.
Tabriz is a mix of multiple cultures. Her father
is Iranian and her mother is Polish-American. She had never touched a computer
until her first year in college, the University of Illinois, where she was
studying computer engineering. “She's only 31, one of the rare women in hacking
circles, and the furthest thing from the antisocial tech-whiz stereotype, and
it's easy to see why Tabriz is on a rapid upward trajectory,“ writes Clare Malone
in Elle magazine.
Tabriz was inspired by the story of John Draper,
otherwise known as Captain Crunch. Draper was working as an US Air Force radar
technician when, in the late 1960s, he discovered how to make free longdistance
calls using a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal. The whistle
emitted a tone at precisely 2600 hertz the same frequency that was used at
the time by the US's biggest phone network to route international calls, making
Draper one of the earliest hackers.
Another big influence was a club she joined in
her college days. Tabriz's website had been hacked, and she wanted to find out
how. The club was just an informal gathering of computer students interested in
the ins and outs of website security. This was in the early 2000s when Internet
Explorer 6 was the dominant browser and Apache, Netscape and Microsoft's
Internet Information Server ruled the web.The club consumed not only Tabriz's
intellectual life, but her social one as well, writes Malone. It also introduced
her early to the dynamic of being the only woman in a roomful of men discussing
computers.
Her title in Google really is `Security
Princess.' She came up with the designation before a trip to Japan because she
needed business cards to hand out during the elaborate professional
introductions traditional in that country. “A couple of people had `hired
hacker'. But I like to one-up people. I thought it was cute,“ she tells Malone.
It may have been cute, but it's also because Tabriz doesn't care too much for
stuffy official titles. “Some people in other parts of the industry, they
introduce themselves as, like, `vice president,' with all of these
certifications. I couldn't give a shit. You could be Code Monkey Number 507,
but if you're doing cool stuff, I'm much more interested in talking to you than
to whoever's senior vice president,“ she says.
Tabriz also feels that most black-hat hackers
give the profession a bad name. She is doing her bit to change that impression.
She mentors under-16s at a yearly computer science conference in Las Vegas. The
children who take part in DEFCON are taught how to `hack for good' and girls
are more than encouraged to join.
TOI 22MAR15
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