Ben Hawkes is a computer security expert and white hat hacker from

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

, previously employed by

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 manager of their

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 ...

. 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 mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

, Apple's iOS and the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. 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.

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