Five Year Old Hacks Dad’s Xbox One, Gets Rewarded By Microsoft
Five years old is typically that time of your life when you are worried about what cartoon to watch next or what Xbox One game to play. That’s not the case however with Kristoffer Von Hassel, though. This San Diego kid had better things to do than watching stupid cartoons – like figuring out security loopholes in Microsoft’s Xbox One account, reports CNN.
Kristopher has been recently acknowledged by the world’s largest software company by being amongst a select group of people who have helped Microsoft identify security holes. While his name appears with a list of individuals who are much older to him, no reference has been made to the “Researcher’s” actual age on Microsoft’s website. Perhaps, it might be more embarrassing for Microsoft to admit the fact that even a five-year-old could outfox Microsoft’s elaborate security mechanisms.
Lest we forget, the Redmond based software giant has awarded Kristoffer with four free games, a year’s free Xbox Live subscription and $50. Microsoft has confirmed in a statement where the company says it is very thankful to Kristoffer; “We’re always listening to our customers and thank them for bringing issues to our attention. We take security seriously at Xbox and fixed the issue as soon as we learned about it.”
That said, we’ve got to admit that Kristoffer’s finding out of that security hole with the Xbox One did not involve much of hard core coding. In fact, the security hole that he found out was a little one that allowed him to log on to his Dad’s Xbox One account without a password.
More interesting is the fact that his dad, himself a security analyst asked Kristoffer how he breached the Xbox One security, instead of giving the kid an expected spanking most other parents would have done. It was after this that Kristoffer revealed that all he did was to enter the wrong password after which the system prompted him with a password verification screen. After this, he used the on-screen space bar to fill up the password field. This was enough to trick the system which eventually let Kristoffer in to his Dad’s Xbox One account.
Now, just so that you know, this isn’t actually the first time Kristoffer has managed to detect and go past password protected schemes. Even when he was a toddler, he was smart enough to figure out a way to go past a locked cellphone. All he did was to keep the Home key pressed for a while.
“How awesome is that! Just being 5 years old and being able to find a vulnerability and latch onto that. I thought that was pretty cool,” said the boy’s father, Robert Davies.
If you are trying to login to Xbox One using that flaw, Microsoft has since the fixed that issue. Too bad you were late to join the party!
[Image via WGHP TV]
