The committee staff asked me to address specific questions about adversaries and threat intelligence. US House Committee on Government Reform announced the federal government’s computer security report card (.pdf). First, find a good spot to mount the solar powered security light, where you would like the solar motion light to shine. Some judges will let you know on the spot whether they are going to approve your disability benefits. Just like any other skill, you have to train your ability to spot the subtle edge cases that might represent a vulnerability. For people who cannot receive their regularly scheduled Social Security payment as a result of Hurricane Harvey, in most cases they can go to any open Social Security office and request an immediate payment. While this can make things a little awkward at the office sometimes, in the end it encourages Google to further invest in having great procedures and relationships in place with upstream projects and vendors, and that’s a good thing. Real users make risk decisions based on the public perception of the security of these devices. There’s no strict rule about having public bugs to point to, but it’s certainly easier to generate excitement about your work that way.

I have experience with vulnerability research, but I don’t have any public bugs, what can I do? There isn’t a predefined career path overall, but we typically look for candidates with security-related practical experience. It’s useful for candidates to have publicly reported vulnerabilities, as finding vulnerabilities internal to product development and finding bugs externally often involves different challenges. It can also be worthwhile to ask your employer if there are any projects that involve publicly reporting vulnerabilities, such as reviewing third-party components that you can get involved in. Showing your technical skills via non-security projects is a good idea in this situation, and it’s often possible to build a reputation as a talented security researcher even when your results can’t be published. You can apply for a full-time Project Zero researcher role using the Information Security Engineer job posting found here. Also, many Project Zero members started off at other roles at Google, so another option is to apply for another security role at Google and gain experience that way. This can be a good way to learn more about vulnerabilities and meet people who can help you learn more about them.

Most patched security issues aren’t discovered by Project Zero, so having a “special case” for our team’s findings wouldn’t change much in practice, and getting the fundamentals of good patch management right is much more important in the long run. I agree — learning the fundamentals of programming, operating systems, and machine architecture is a great starting point. Also, anyone who says “this attack could never bring down a machine” or “the web server gets hit with this stuff all the time” hasn’t been involved with an enterprise scanning operation for long. To apply for a security internship at Google, apply for the following position (note that applications may be closed depending on the time of year, they will open again in preparation for the summer term). Just make a note that you’re interested in Project Zero! Successful candidates have often publicly reported vulnerabilities or worked on interesting projects in the areas of vulnerability research, exploitation or reverse engineering, so make sure to include anything related on your resume! They are hacking contests consisting of challenges in categories such as web security, cryptography, reverse engineering, exploitation which are open to everyone. Finally, Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions are another great way to learn bug hunting and exploitation skills.

If you have the opportunity to attend, security conferences are a great way to learn more about vulnerability research, and meet other people who are interested in it. Reporting some vulnerabilities publicly before applying to Project Zero will make your application more likely to be successful. America is one country, where the people are very cautious about their home security and they make sure that sufficient mechanisms are in place so that their home remains free from intruders. In this article, from before I joined Google, I gave some advice for students interested in careers in security. My biggest suggestion is to learn about coding and how computers work, at school if possible, as this is very important for security and many other careers. If you are looking for work, it can be a good idea to apply for some entry-level positions at security consultancies and product security teams. There are people who have worked in product security for other companies, for security consultancies and for government security teams. Typically a candidate can expect to encounter a mix of security focused and software engineering focused questions in the interviews.

So candidates apply to our job posting, and then go through a phone interview, and then five interviews on different topics if they are successful. Vendor accounts. What prevents the bookkeeper from creating fictitious vendors and then creating payments they receive themselves? You see can bugs that Project Zero has filed in the past in our tracker, to get an idea of what areas we generally look for vulnerabilities in. What is the hiring process for Project Zero? Project Zero follows roughly the same hiring process that the rest of Google does. Does Project Zero hire interns? Google hires many interns for security positions, and they occasionally work with Project Zero. Some companies are willing to train people with a strong interest in security and this can be a great way to gain experience. Reviewing open-source projects and participating in bug bounties can be a good way to get started with this. These teams often have trouble encouraging secure coding and other good security practices within the company and are happy to meet people in other roles who are interested in security and can help with this.