At some point in our lives we’ve all faced the dread of reaching our data allowance for the month.
Your life somewhat feels empty when you can’t look at Facebook or listen to Spotify on the morning commute, but this kid has managed to somehow hack his way to never experiencing this hell on Earth again.
Meet Jacob Ajit. This 17-year-old hacker, managed to hack his way into getting free data on his T-Mobile phone. When I was 17-years-old I could barely deal with life, let alone try and do something like this. Crazy shit.
He made this incredible discovery just while he was a bit bored on his phone with no service.
Writing about his finding in a Medium post, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology student said: “Wow, this was great! I can now host all my Taylor Swift songs in the cloud and access them on my phone without paying for data!” Gotta have those priorities.
Despite the phone having no service, he still able to connect to the network, which took Jacob through to a portal asking him to renew the pre-paid phone plan.
After doing a little more digging, he found that he could get random apps to connect to the network- this included the Speedtest app.
Along with this application, he found that he was able to access media sent from any folder labelled ‘/speedtest’, which Jacob believes is possibly because T-Mobile labels these files trustworthy.
To test this new theory, he set up his own ‘/speedtest’ folder and filled it with different types of media, which he was able to access.
And once he created his own proxy server as a gateway to allow users to access any site he was good to go.
Speaking to Motherboard, Ajit said:
Just like that, I now had access to data throughout the T-Mobile network without maintaining any sort of formal payments or contract. Just my phone’s radios talking to the network’s radios, free of any artificial shackles.
Despite Jacob reaching out to T-Mobile to explain the loophole, they’re yet to get back to him which means it’s still open… for now.
