Article by: Lucy Rodriguez
When you hear the word “princess” a graceful, delicate girl comes to mind. But in the hacker world there is a princess that looks nothing like that. Parisa Tabriz, Google’s “Security Princess” is a bold strong woman who guards Chrome from danger on the net. Her job is to hack Google and find its flaws and fix them before ill intentioned hackers do. At age 31 she leads the information security engineering department at one of the largest internet companies in the world.
The tech world might be a lonely place for a woman, since only 20% of all US programmers are female . But that is no problem to this princess. Tabriz grew up with two brothers, so she has always been comfortable being the only girl in the room. “When I couldn’t outmuscle them, I had to outthink them,” she said to Elle Magazine. She doesn’t perceive gender as a negative for her, though she thinks she “may be a little more pushy than the
Another stereotype Tabriz breaks is that of the hacker. Opposite to what you would expect she wasn’t into technology growing up. It was her talent in science and math that lead her to the tech world. “I didn’t touch computers up until college” she admits to Elle. This is why Tabriz doesn’t rely on stereotypes herself. When hiring she focuses more on what people can do than on the image they portray. “You could be Code Monkey Number 507, but if you’re doing cool stuff, I’m much more interested in talking to you than to whoever’s senior vice president.” She rewards curiosity and creativity on her team, one of the tests she gives to candidates is to hack a vending machine.
It was curiosity that turned her to the branch of security. Her website was hacked and she needed to know how it was done. Those were her first steps on the information security track and she has been fighting cyber crime ever since. Now we can safely surf the net, since we have a princess watching over us.
Source: here.
