17-year-old hacks T-Mobile for fun, gets free data

Seventeen-year-old Jacob Ajit thought it would be fun to get free internet from T-Mobile, and he did.  Image INQUIRER.net

When teenagers get bored, they either pick up a console, play a game, or just glue themselves to their mobile devices while browsing social media. For 17- year Jacob Ajit, hacking major telco providers on his down times is an alternative to playing games.

Ajit explained that his hacking a T-Mobile prepaid SIM on a spare phone innocently started out of boredom and thought of it as a fun challenge to get internet without a data plan, reports The Next Web.

What Ajit found was a that the T-Mobile website continued to function despite the absence of a data plan. Through this he discovered that while other apps could not connect, the Speedtest.net app worked fine even through third-party servers. Digging deeper, he learned that Speedtest could download large 30×30 images hosted on various URLs into a /speedtest folder.

With his new discovery, Ajit tried hosting his Taylor Swift songs in the cloud and eventually built a proxy service hosted in a folder named /speedtest and voila, mobile internet without paying for a single dime!

At this point, T-Mobile has already patched the hole, but surprisingly no one from the company has reached out to Ajit. If anything, this teenager has a bright future in cybersecurity research.  Alfred Bayle