5-year-old boy exposes Xbox Live security bug

Updated
5-Year-Old Boy Exposes Xbox Live Security Bug
5-Year-Old Boy Exposes Xbox Live Security Bug

Looks like this 5-year-old San Diego boy is giving the techies over at Microsoft a run for their money.

"Kristoffer Von Hassel found out that by entering spaces into his dad's password, he gained access to dad's account, and managed to play games he wasn't supposed to play," WGNO reports.

Kristoffer's parents say it all started when they noticed their son was somehow getting onto his dad's account without asking, so they asked him how he was doing it.

Kristoffer showed them in this YouTube / Help1on1 video that when he typed in a wrong password for the account, it went to a password verification screen.




From there, the tiny hacker hit space keys, pressed enter and was suddenly logged in.

KGTV has his reaction:"I was like yea! I got nervous. I thought he was going to find out."

Instead of getting angry, Kristoffer's dad, who works in computer security, was extremely proud of his son. "How awesome is that!"

The Von Hassel family reported the bug to Microsoft, and the company has since come up with a fix.

It said in a statement, "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."

And even cooler? Kristoffer had his name added to a list of security researchers that have helped Microsoft with online security.

Kristoffer received four games, $50 and a year-long subscription to Xbox Live from Microsoft for helping the company out. He says, because of the experience, he wants to be a gamer when he grows up.


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