Security experts attending a cybersecurity conference at the Global Forum in The Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday were treated to a presentation by an 11-year-old “cyber ninja” who demonstrated the woeful standards of cybersecurity in technology. He hacked Bluetooth to control a teddy bear and showed how smart toys “can be turned into weapons.”
The child prodigy in question is American Reuben Paul, a cyber expert and white hacker who currently attends a school in Austin, Texas. “From airplanes to cars, from smart phones to smart homes, anything or any toy can be part of the Internet Of Things (IOT),” Reuben told the audience. “Any smart toy can be a weapon.”
As part of his live demonstration and to prove his theory, Reuben made Bob the teddy bear, which connects to iCloud via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, receive and transmit messages.
He then connected a “Raspberry Pi” – a tiny, low-cost computer – to his laptop and began scanning the room for available Bluetooth devices. To the surprise of everyone in the room, the boy managed to download dozens of numbers, including some top officials.
Then, using the programming language called Python, he proceeded to hack into his teddy bear over the internet via one of the numbers and turned on Bob's lights and transmitted a recorded message from the audience through the game.
"They could be used to steal personal information like passwords, remotely monitor devices to spy on children, or track a person using GPS. Even worse, the toys could even be programmed to say 'meet me at this place and we'll leave together,'" said Reuben.
But in addition to being a cyber-ninja, Reuben is also the youngest American to earn a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu. With the help of his family, Reuben created a non-profit organization called CyberShaolin, whose purpose is to raise awareness about “cyber dangers.”.
Reuben's father, Mano Paul, an IT specialist, said his son's skills emerged at the age of six, when he began exploring how software systems worked.
Reuben hopes to study cybersecurity at either Caltech or MIT.
