Remember PS3 hacker Geohot? Now he works for Google

George "Geohot" Hotz - the man who hacked the PlayStation 3, among many other things - now works for Google.

The 24-year-old New Jersey-born hacker works as part of Google's Project Zero, an elite team of full-time hackers who are paid to find security vulnerabilities in software, reports Wired.

Apparently Hotz picked through browser Chrome earlier this year, told Google about it and scored himself a $150,000 reward. Then, they offered him a job.

Hotz hit the headlines in 2007 when as a 17-year-old he cracked the iPhone. But he rose to prominence in gamer land when in 2010 he reverse engineered the PS3. Sony sued him but later settled out of court after he promised not to hack other Sony products.

Things have been a little quiet on the Geohot front since then. It later emerged that in May 2011 Sony invited him to its US headquarters to meet with engineers and discuss his methods. In secret he moved to California to work for Facebook, but eight months later he quit. He then travelled to Panama before returning to Palo Alto.

So what's Project Zero all about?

"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," said Google's Chris Evans on the Project Zero blog.

"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.

"Project Zero is our contribution, to start the ball rolling. Our objective is to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks. We're hiring the best practically-minded security researchers and contributing 100 per cent of their time toward improving security across the Internet."

At least this story gives us the chance to re-watch GeoHot's infamous anti-Sony rap video, below. Quality stuff.

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