A five-year-old kid from San Diego, Calif., has discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft's Xbox One that allows for unauthorized backdoor access in Xbox Live.
The young boy may not be a reputed security researcher, but he did manage to gain access to his father's Xbox Live account although he did not have the password for it.
The five-year-old, Kristoffer Von Hassel, was not allowed to access his father's Xbox Live account, but a kid's ingenuity can lead to great discoveries. Although he had protected his account, Robert Davies, the boy's father, started noticing that Kristoffer was somehow managing to log in and play games he was not supposed to.
Basically, when prompted to enter a password for his father's Xbox Live account, Kristoffer would just type in a wrong combination that would take him to a password verification screen. Once there, the kid simply put in a series of spaces and hit enter, which gave him backdoor access to the off-limits games in his father's account.
Kristoffer was worried he'd get into trouble once his father found out, but Davies was actually quite proud of his son's achievement and was curious to learn how he managed to do it.
"How awesome is that? Just being five years old and being able to find a vulnerability and latch on to that," Davies told CNN affiliate KGTV-10 in an interview. "I thought it was pretty cool," added the boy's father, who just so happens to work in online security.
After Kristoffer saw that he wasn't in trouble, he excitedly showed his father how he did it, and Davies reported the vulnerability to Microsoft."
"We're always listening to our customers and thank them for bringing issues to our attention," Microsoft said in a statement issues to KGTV-10. "We take security seriously at Xbox and fixed the issue as soon as we learned about it."
Microsoft will also reward its youngest security researcher for his findings, giving Kristoffer four games, a $50 gift card and a year-long subscription for Xbox Live. Head over to KGTV-10 to watch the video and see how a five-year-old boy adorably exploited a serious security issue on Microsoft's Xbox One.
