Ten Year Old Girl Hacker Reveals Mobile Gaming

The DefCon hacker event in Las Vegas last week was unique in that the show launched a new division called DefCon Kids. As News.com reports, DefCom Kids has already generated an interesting story. A 10 year old girl hacker who is only known in public by her nickname “CyFi” has announced that she has found a zero-day flaw in some mobile phone games that run on the iOS and Android operating systems.

The story reports that the girl, who does not want to give out her real name, found out about the flaw while playing farm themed games on her phone. It seems that some iOS and Android based games can be effected by simply advancing the phone’s clock. The flaw allowed for things like crops in the farm games to mature more quickly than they would otherwise. “CyFi” claims that while some games can detect that kind of workaround, she found some ways to fool the game that more time had passed. The story says, “Disconnecting the phone from Wi-Fi made it harder to stop, as did making incremental clock adjustments.”

So far the young hacker hasn’t revealed which mobile games can be affected by this type of OS time manipulation, allowing “the vendors which make the affected games a chance to respond.” In the meantime the hacker’s mother, who is also unidentified in the article, says that she is offering a $100 reward to be given to “the young hacker who found the most games with this exploit over the following 24 hours.”

Gallery