Wired story of “Project Zero”
Although initially the story is a nice feel good story of hiring George Holtz after he hacks the AT&T iPhone lock and reverse engineering the Playstation 3.
This is a small window into the life of a hacker – where one can figure out the software security cracks and fissures. One may think the world is nice and safe but the world is just waiting to be hacked for genius wunderkind software hackers.
“Project Zero” is an off-shoot name of Zero-day attacks. Where a zero-day is the time that a vulnerability has been discovered but not yet patched. As you can see in this small analysis of reading the IBM Threat Intelligence Quarterly, once a vulnerability starts to be scanned and looked for by hackers (specifically for Heartbleed in April of 2014)
Google is using “Project Zero” to hire outstanding programmers to eventually help one of their various initiatives. It is a worthwhile endeavor (for Google) and the rest of world, but it is a long-term project and does not fix current issues.
Hackers are looking for vulnerabilities, and once found there are other hackers looking to penetrate your systems, this is a known fact.
What you do’t know is how your systems look to the hackers, are they vulnerable? Are your systems already hacked?