George Hotz

Hotz attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology at the Bergen County Academies, a magnet public high school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Hotz is an alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program. Hotz also briefly attended Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

Hotz made a meaningful side income from public donations solicited for his security exploits.

Hotz worked at Facebook between May 2011 and January 2012.

On July 16, 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with the Project Zero team where he developed Qira for dynamically analysing application binaries.

Hotz was employed at the startup Vicarious from January until July 2015.

In 2022, shortly after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Hotz announced that he had joined the company for a 12-week internship, with the task of fixing Twitter search as well as removing the pop up log-in screen displayed to users scrolling without being logged in to an account. On December 20, after less than 5 weeks at the role, he resigned, stating “appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there”.

Sony lawsuit

On December 29, 2010, hacking group fail0verflow did a presentation at the 27th Chaos Communications Congress where they exposed a mistake of Sony in their usage of ECDSA signatures without publishing the corresponding private key. This key was used by Sony to prevent piracy. On January 2, 2011, Hotz posted a copy of the private key of the PlayStation 3 on his website. These keys were later removed from his website as a result of legal action by Sony against fail0verflow and Hotz. In response to his continued publication of PS3 exploit information, Sony filed on January 11, 2011, for an application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against him in the US District Court of Northern California.

Hotz published his commentary on the case, including a song about the "disaster" of Sony. Sony in turn has demanded that social media sites, including YouTube, hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot's social pages and videos, the latter being the case only for those who "watched the video and 'documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video".

PayPal granted Sony access to Geohot's PayPal account contribution transactions, and the judge of the case granted Sony permission to view the IP addresses of everyone who visited geohot.com. In April 2011, it was revealed that Sony and Hotz had settled the lawsuit out of court, on the condition that Hotz would never again resume any hacking work on Sony products.