Google hiring special team to spot critical bugs in Android apps

As bugs in highly-sensitive apps on Google Play Store keep increasing, Google is now looking for security engineers to find critical vulnerabilities and focus largely on fake Covid-19 contact tracing and election-related apps.

The security engineers will manage a team that “performs reverse engineering, technical security assessments, code audits and design reviews of third-party Android applications and libraries,” Google said in the latest job posting.

There’s no such thing as a “safe system” — only safer systems and Google said that its security team works to create and maintain the safest operating environment for Google’s users and developers.

“As a Security Engineer, you help protect network boundaries, keep computer systems and network devices hardened against attacks and provide security services to protect highly sensitive data like passwords and customer information”.

“You also work with software engineers to proactively identify and fix security flaws and vulnerabilities,” Google said.

The new security team will be independent of the Google Play Security Reward Programme (GPSRP) which is Google’s bug bounty programme for Android apps listed on the Play Store.

The tech giant last year announced to pay $1 million (nearly Rs 10 crore) as a top award to security researchers who can find a unique bug in its Pixel series of smartphones that may compromise users’ data.

There is an additional 50 percent bonus if a security researcher is able to find an exploit on “specific developer preview versions of Android”, resulting in a prize of $1.5 million (Rs 10.5 crore).

The new Android security team will identify fundamental security problems at Google and drive major security improvements in Google infrastructure.

“You’ll face a wide variety of code quality issues, and work towards detecting flaws both obvious and highly discrete”.