Yep, hackers are getting younger. This is cyfi, who began her career at ten; she is now 13. Since 2010, she has helped found and run R00tz Asylum -- the kids' edition of DefCon, one of the world's biggest hacking and security conferences. "This year, we learned how to break into lawful intercept machines, how to use technology to fight dictators, change traffic lights and hack elevators," she says. For next year, the teenage white-hat hacker is aiming even higher. "I'm working on an invitation to Notch, founder of Minecraft, to keynote," she says.
CyFi (a pseudonym insisted on by her parents) got into hacking when she discovered a new class of bugs in mobile games. "My family travels a lot, so I spend my time playing farming-style games on my iPad," she says. "I got bored waiting for ages for things to grow so I could harvest them, so I started looking for ways to get around it." What she discovered was a "zero-day" flaw that let her manually advance the time setting, or fast-forward the game (it's since been reported and fixed).
For the first R00tz event in 2010, CyFi created a contest where kids could find other games with the same time vulnerability. The person with the most bugs would win a $100 (£61) prize. This August, the event drew 200 attendees aged eight to 16 who want to be white-hat hackers. "My favourite part was the junkyard, where you could take apart old pieces of electronics with a soldering iron and uncover the bits inside them," she says. Now, CyFi is focusing on school in California (she skipped a year) and on learning Python on Codecademy, while continuing to mine apps for security flaws. "I encourage kids to dive into hacking and try and report as many bugs as they can find," she says, "to help make the internet a better, safer place."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
