Ben Hawkes is a computer security expert and

white hat White hat, white hats, or white-hat may refer to: Art, entertainment, and media * White hat, a way of thinking in Edward de Bono's book ''Six Thinking Hats'' * White hat, part of black and white hat symbolism in film Other uses * White hat (compu ...

hacker from

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

, previously employed by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

as manager of their

Project Zero Project Zero is a team of security analysts employed by Google tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities. It was announced on 15 July 2014. History After finding a number of flaws in software used by many end-users while researching other p ...

. Hawkes has been credited with finding dozens of flaws in computer software, such as within

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

, Apple's iOS and the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

. His role was acknowledged, for instance, in an Adobe 2015 security bulletin, which announced updates that addressed critical vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to take control of the affected system. In 2019, he reported two vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to tap iPhone microphones and spy on calls. Before Hawkes became part of Project Zero, he was first part of the Google team tasked with the security of Google's product launches. Hawkes regularly publishes research on his works, particularly on vulnerability analysis and software exploitation such as novel heap exploitation techniques on Windows.

References

External links

* Google employees New Zealand computer specialists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people {{compu-bio-stub