Ian Beer is a

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

computer security expert and white hat hacker, currently residing in

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

and working for

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

as part of its

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

. He has been lauded by some as one of the best

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

hackers. Beer was the first security expert to publish his findings under the "Project Zero" name in the spring of 2014; at this time, the project was not yet revealed and crediting the newly discovered vulnerabilities to it led to some speculation. He is known for discovering a large number of security vulnerabilities in

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

products, including iOS,

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

and

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, as well as helping create jailbreaks for iOS versions. One such discovery forced Apple to rewrite significant parts of the macOS and iOS

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

. Beer is also a vocal critic of Apple concerning its

bug bounty program A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations, and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security vulnerabilities. If no fin ...

for iOS announced in 2016. The invite only program has been accused of low payouts. Beer has also criticized the company for not disclosing to its users why updates that fix the bugs should be installed.

References

British computer specialists Google employees Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{UK-compu-bio-stub