10-year-old girl hacker targets smartphone games - CBS News

10-year-old CyFi at DefCon Kids 2011

(Credit: CNET/Seth Rosenblatt)

(CBS/CNET) - Not all little girls want to play with dolls. Some of them want to hack into smartphones and speed up the clock in games like Farmville. Why didn't we think of that?

The young girl in question goes by the pseudonym "CyFi" to protect her identity and is from California. Around January 2011, bored with waiting for to farm-type games, the young hacker pondered how to get around the long hours required to "grow" something like cabbage.

Speaking to CNET about an hour before her presentation at DefCon Kids, CyFi said, "It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow. So I thought, 'Why don't I just change the time?'"

Many games will detect and block this kind of manipulation, but CyFi said that she discovered some ways around those detections. Disconnecting the phone from Wi-Fi made it harder to stop, as did making incremental clock adjustments. The devices she tested ran both Android and iOS operating systems. 

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CyFi has not revealed the specific games with security flaws, so that the game developers have a chance to fix the security breach. But, let's be honest, it's not difficult to guess.

This was the first year the DefCon hacking conference created a space for kids to learn how to hack. DefCon Kids provided classrooms and workstations for the youngsters.

DefCon started in 1993 as a party for a small group of hackers. The event grew to become the world's largest hacking conference and continues to attract computer security professionals, federal government employees, programming enthusiasts and, of course, hackers.