A flaw in the Xbox One secutiry system allowed a 5-year-old to buy and play games from his father’s account without knowing his father’s password.

In a report by KGTV in Southern California, 5-year-old Kristoffer von Hassel was able to get into his father’s account, allowing him to purchase and play games without his father’s correct password. Kristoffer said that he exploited this flaw several times.

 

Kristoffer was able to do this by typing in a wrong password into the system. When the secondary password verification screen came up, he simply put in all spaces. This allowed him to access a back door into the system. When the father alerted Microsoft of the flaw, the company fixed this issue and gave Kristoffer four free games, $50, and a year-long subscription to Xbox Live Gold.

 

My Opinion

 

While many people will say that the console should have gone through much more testing in order to find these flaws, it is the job of the beta testers of the console to find any of these flaws. This could have possibly just been a failsafe built into the console that was meant to be taken out, but it is still a little unsettling that someone can find a big flaw like that in a console. Such is the downside of a new console generation.

 

___________________________________________________

Shawn Richards studies games to understand how they work. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.