In fairy tales, it’s usually the princess that needs protection. At Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the princess is the one defending the castle.
Meet Parisa Tabriz, the 31-year-old with perhaps the most enchanted job title in engineering — “Google Security Princess.”
Her job is to hack into the most popular web browser on the planet, trying to find flaws in the system before the “black hats” do.
Out-hacking the hackers
Indeed, much like the good and bad witches of the Wizard of Oz, hackers are described as having “white” or “black” hats. To defeat Google’s attackers, Tabriz must firstly think like them.
In this cyberspace battle, the data of around a billion Chrome users hangs in the balance — and Tabriz wasn’t going to settle for any old moniker.
“When I started, my official job title was ‘Information Security Engineer,’ which I thought was a bit boring and not really meaningful,” said the Iranian-Polish-American, speaking a million miles an hour over the phone from Google HQ.
“So I changed it to ‘Security Princess’ as more of a tongue-in-cheek thing. I’ve never been exceptionally girly or fit the stereotype of a princess, so it was a bit ironic for me to go by that name — and then it stuck!”
READ MORE ABOUT THE WITCH HERE
