As Google’s top hacker, Parisa Tabriz thinks like a criminal—and manages the brilliant, wonky guys on her team with the courage and calm of a hostage negotiator.
“Security Princess” is Parisa Tabriz’s official title at Google. Seriously. And yes, you can google that. “‘Information Security Engineer’ is just completely dry and boring and horrible,” she says of the HR-speak title, which indeed whitewashes what Tabriz does all day, which is to hack her employer—the single most recognizable entity of the Internet age—bad-guy-in-basement style. She came up with the moniker before a trip to Japan because she needed business cards to hand out during the elaborate professional introductions traditional in that country. “A couple of people had ‘hired hacker,’” she says. “But I like to one-up people. I thought it was cute.”
Cute, sure, but it’s also because Parisa Tabriz doesn’t much care what you think about her. Not in a screw-the-man kind of way—she’s too midwestern friendly for that, and, after all, she works for the establishment company of Silicon Valley. It’s more that she prefers not to suffer fools. “Some people in other parts of the industry, they introduce themselves as, like, ‘vice president,’ with all of these certifications,” she says, amused. “I couldn’t give a shit. 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.”
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In the world of hacking, Tabriz is basically the equivalent of Glinda the Good Witch—all of the power and skills, none of the evil inclinations or armies of marauding monkeys (just the coder ones). Leading a crew of hacker engineers, she is paid to think like a criminal, to suss out weaknesses in Google Chrome—the world’s most-used Internet browser—that could be exploited by ne’er-do-wells, then ensure that they’re fixed before that can happen. It’s a daily preemptive strike against online identity theft that protects millions of people around the world. Add to that that she’s only 31, one of the rare women in hacking circles, and the furthest thing from the antisocial tech-whiz stereotype, and it’s easy to see why Tabriz is on a rapid upward trajectory.
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Glinda-esque as her job might be, Tabriz appears to wear black almost exclusively. “It’s slimming,” she says, shrugging, not that she needs to worry about that. She has a simpatico face, always worn bare, that could easily elide from one ethnicity to another and a classic Gap-in-its-heyday sleek tomboy aesthetic: dark-wash jeans, clean-line crewnecks, and Chuck Taylors, with the occasional bomber jacket thrown on top.
Tabriz might well be the ideal personification of Google’s informal “Don’t be evil” motto, at a time when the company is eager to shore up that image, having been rocked by Edward Snowden’s leak revealing the secret National Security Agency program that gave federal officials unfettered access to tech-company servers (including Google’s) and, by proxy, to users’ personal information. The proactive work done by Tabriz and her team is one user-service area that Google can unabashedly brag about.
Hackers exist in a constant state of moral purgatory—the line between right and wrong is often murky—but they like to think of themselves in black-and-white terms all the same. Tabriz’s side, the white hats (yes, that’s actually what they call themselves), is made up of people like the Good Samaritan who returns the expensive purse she finds on the subway. The black hats (again, a label worn with pride) think the white hats are suckers—not only do they swipe the Birkin, but they rifle through the crocodile-skin datebook inside to find new victims. Black hats weaponize their knowledge of how to attack a system—a so-called exploit—and sell it to the highest bidder.
Tabriz was never going to be a good candidate for the dark side, and in fact, she’s an unlikely pick to have ended up a hacker at all. “I wanted to be Jem. Do you know Jem and the Holograms?” she says, referring to the 1980s cartoon—and Hannah Montana predecessor—about a pink-haired girl rocker with a buttoned-down alter ego. We’re at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, sitting in a conference room that’s as anodyne as they come—outsiders aren’t allowed into the building where Tabriz works, and lest I spirit away any intellectual property, a friendly PR Sherpa with a nose stud is required to escort me everywhere, including the bathroom. (Google toilets, in case you were wondering, feature high-tech automated Japanese-style bidets that allow for controlled water temperature and pressure.)
