11-year-old casually hacks into security experts' Bluetooth to control teddy bear

Kids are really precocious these days but this is something else.

An 11-year-old has shocked an audience of security experts by casually hacking into their Bluetooth devices to control his robotic teddy bear. No big deal.

Reuben Paul, sixth-grader genius from Austin, Texas, travelled to a cyber-security conference in the Netherlands in order to stun hundreds of IT experts who were live-tweeting the miracle in awe.

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“From airplanes to automobiles, from smartphones to smart homes, anything or any toy can be part of the Internet of Things (IoT),” he told the audience of the World Forum in The Hague.

“From terminators to teddy bears, anything or any toy can be weaponised.”

People were seriously star-struck:

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How did he do that?

His bear, named Bob, is connected to to the cloud via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to receive and send messages.

In order to manipulate it, Reuben plugged into his laptop a device known as a "Raspberry Pi", a tiny, low-cost computer. Then, he scanned the hall for Bluetooth devices and downloaded dozens of numbers.

Using the Python language, he proceeded to hack into his bear via one of the numbers and turned on Bob's lights and recorded audio.

“Most internet-connected things have a Bluetooth functionality ... I basically showed how I could connect to it, and send commands to it, by recording audio and playing the light,” he told AFP.

“IoT home appliances, things that can be used in our everyday lives, our cars, lights refrigerators, everything like this that is connected can be used and weaponised to spy on us or harm us.”

Reuben, who when he was just 8 delivered the closing keynote address at the 2014 Houston Security Conference, later tweeted that his mission was to warn people how Internet of Things devices could easily be hacked:

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