10-year-old girl hacker finds zero-day exploit
While most children find great pleasure in playing video games, some of them get bored and what to move onto the next fascinating game.
Californian girl hacker, CyFi, who is only ten years old decided she wanted to work around her frustrations with the farm style games that she has enjoyed. Her curiosity led to her discovering a zero-day exploit in a number of games on the iOS and Android platforms. The exploit revolves around the clock used on devices running the two mobile operating systems. Many of the farm style games rely on clocks to grow crops. It usually takes many hours for them to grow within the game, but CyFi discovered a way of speeding up the process. She found she could change the clock, therefore allowing her plants to instantly grow. Usually these clocks are blocked, however CyFi did some further investigating and found those checks could be altered by disabling the Wi-Fi or only increasing the time in small increments repeatedly. She presented her results at the DefCon Kids conference over the weekend. Although the security breach was not a serious one, it’s amazing that a ten year old could work out the process and find holes in the apps.
Via CNet