Discovering the Xbox One Security Issue
A potentially serious security problem with the Xbox One has been exposed and fixed, all thanks to the efforts of a young boy, Kristoffer Von Hassel, from San Diego. Kristoffer was using the One when he discovered that wrongly entering a password on the log-in screen resulted in the system asking for a second password. Kristoffer then found that filling the secondary log-in with spaces and hitting enter allowed him to access his father Robert’s account. On finding out, rather than be angry with Kristoffer, Robert asked him to demonstrate how he got into his father’s account. Robert then contacted Microsoft with details of the issue. In response, Microsoft released a statement saying “We’re always listening to our customers and thank them for bringing issues to our attention…We take security seriously at Xbox and fixed the issue as soon as we learned about it.”
While Kristoffer was initially worried that he would get in trouble for accessing his father’s account, Microsoft were happy to be able to fix the problem, and publicly acknowledged Kristoffer on a list of people who have helped them to fix security issues with the Xbox One. Kristoffer was also given a year’s subscription to Xbox Live, as well as four games and £30 for his efforts.
As much as it’s unfortunate for Microsoft that such a simple flaw existed within their new system, it comes across well that they’ve acknowledged Kristoffer’s part in solving the problem as well as giving him a reward. Although some issues are always going to be expected with a new hardware launch, given the potential of this particular problem if someone other than a young child were to stumble upon it, it’s more than possible that Microsoft got off extremely lightly.