10 Year Old Hacker Shows Off iOS Game Exploit at DefCon

Remember when kids used to sit and play with plastic toys and run around outside? Me neither. It seems that these days, the joys of hacking are too strong a pull for our little ones.

CNET highlights a 10-year old hacker, going by the name of CyFi, who has presented an exploit to the “Kids” section of the popular hacking conference, DefCon. The exploit, which currently works on both iOS and Android, allows certain games to be prematurely advanced by simply altering the device’s clock…

The young hacker apparently grew tired of waiting for her crops to grown in an unknown iOS farming game. Feeling mischievous, she set her iPhone’s clock forward, and presto! Her crops were fully grown.

Apparently, there are currently a few games on both iOS and Android that are susceptible to such an exploit, but they haven’t been outed in order to give their developers time to issue a fix. We’re eagerly watching our app updates to see which were affected. And no word yet on whether either Apple or Google will patch the problem at an operating system level.

What a clever kid!