17-year-old USA hacker Jacob Ajit has figured out how to get free mobile data on his smartphone, following a speed test he ran from a SIM with no service. He discovered a flaw in T-Mobile’s filters that allowed him to use the network’s data, even when he hadn’t paid for anything.
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Without an active service, the phone was still able to connect to the network, taking Mr Ajit through to a portal asking him to renew the pre-paid phone plan.
The teenager, who is studying at Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, realized that he could get unlimited free data on his handset by logging into T-Mobile’s national network. He ran a Speedtest app and discovered that the phone had an active 20 Mbps connection.
“Ajit figured out that he was able to access media sent from any folder labelled “/speedtest”, possibly because T-Mobile whitelists media files from speed tests regardless of the host.
“Ajit thought that T-Mo was simply performing a check for formatted “/speedtest” folders, and if there was one when the user was trying to access data, the request would go through. There are hundreds of servers, however, and there are likely other sites and apps that T-Mobile might want non-subscribers to have access to, so implementing such a whitelist would be a tedious task.
‘I can now host all my Taylor Swift songs in the cloud and access them on my phone without paying for data!’ It’s not something that every single person will take advantage of because it requires a bit more effort than just popping an inactive T-Mo prepaid SIM into your phone and browsing the web normally, but I imagine that it’s still a loophole that T-Mobile would like closed.
Investigating further, Mr Ajit said: ‘I chose to stretch things a bit and see if any random apps would connect to the [network]’.
He then created his own proxy server as a gateway to allow users to access any site – although he has since removed the proxy.
T-Mobile has yet to comment on the exploit, but Ajit notes that it shouldn’t be hard to fix.
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I can’t remember exactly what I was doing with my spare time as a 17-year-old teenager, but it sure wasn’t finding flaws in T-Mobile’s system. He explains that this permits users to circumvent “any artificial shackles” and allows the phone’s radios to talk to the network’s radios unbridled.
