12-year-old whiz-kid on why we need to reimagine cyber security

[Nergal]

 

IF YOU ever want to feel inadequate, do a Google search for Reuben Paul.

He lives at home with his parents in Texas where he routinely hacks into internet-connected devices such as smart toys to show how easy it is for many of the household devices we rely on to be compromised and used against us.

He is so good at hacking into supposedly secure networks that he’s had job offers from the Dutch government and the US Department of Defence.

Not bad for a kid who hasn’t finished sixth grade.

The 12-year-old appeared on CBS this month and was able to steal the journalist’s password to hack into his Twitter account by using a fake page he had cloned after the reporter connected to his public Wi-Fi network.

“It’s that easy? So in other words, if I was sitting at a Starbucks, I went to sign in to Twitter, I put it in, they got it?” asked the CBS journo.

“Uh-huh,” Reuben replied.

He also hacked a Bluetooth-enabled stuffed animal designed to allow travelling parents to send messages back to their kids, turning it into a secret recording device.

“If a 12-year-old can do it, what makes it that somebody who is a skilled, actual cyber terrorist, what makes it that they can’t do it?” the youngster told CBS.

“This Bluetooth is going into new autonomous cars, autonomous drones. It’s going into medical devices.”

When he’s not in school, Reuben travels the world — along with his dad who works in cyber security — to raise awareness about everyday cyber threats, in particular warning that public Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks are easily attacked and “poisoned”.

“I’ll never connect to a public Wi-Fi that I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody can just hack into that Wi-Fi network and poison it.”

Of course he’s not the only one to point out such pitfalls in our increasingly digital lives.

In a 2017 article titled “Why You Really Need To Stop Using Public Wi-Fi,” the Harvard Technology Review warned “you’re rolling the dice every time you log on to a free network in a coffee shop, hotel lobby or airport lounge”.

And last year’s massive KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability served as a global reminder that modern public Wi-Fi networks are easily corruptible, making it possible for cyber criminals to eavesdrop on your conversations or steal your data.

“From terminators to teddy bears, anything or any toy can be weaponised,” Reuben told an audience at the World Forum in The Hague last year.

At a separate tech conference in Singapore, he pushed the idea that we need to rethink how we secure our devices.

“It is important that we need to reinvent cybersecurity, because obviously what we have invented so far is clearly not working,” he said.

In an effort to spread awareness about potential cyber vulnerabilities in the era of the so-called Internet of Things, Reuben has set up a non-profit to create videos that teach people about cyber dangers.