bio

I first got into cybersecurity and chose Computer Science as a major because I wanted to be like McGee from the TV show, NCIS. But overall, I was initially attracted to cybersecurity and have stayed for many years, because it looked like fun puzzles to solve and I believed (and believe) that we can truly help people if everyone, regardless of race, gender, nationality, socio-economic status, can have safe and secure access to the Internet. 

Why did you get into cybersecurity?

I first got into cybersecurity and chose Computer Science as a major because I wanted to be like McGee from the TV show, NCIS. But overall, I was initially attracted to cybersecurity and have stayed for many years, because it looked like fun puzzles to solve and I believed (and believe) that we can truly help people if everyone, regardless of race, gender, nationality, socio-economic status, can have safe and secure access to the Internet. 

More about Maddie's work.

I recently joined the Google Project Zero team where I am leading a new effort to study zero-day exploits, exploits that use a wholly unknown vulnerability, used in the wild. I am analyzing how can we make it that much harder for bad actors to use 0-days against people successfully. I've been reverse engineering some of the recent 0-days used in the wild, such as the NSO exploit against Whatsapp, to see what we can learn about their vulnerability hunting and exploit development practices. 

Maddie's Cybersecurity Tip

The single most effective way to protect yourself is to never re-use your passwords. This doesn't mean you need to memorize all these different passwords, you can use a password manager. I personally use Keepass because it's free, open source, doesn't back up your passwords to the cloud, and is supported on all the major platforms.