Jacob Ajit, a Virginia high school student, is likewise a hacker who located a loophole that gave him entry to T-Cellular’s LTE information community without a plan—absolutely free. “On Friday night, I used to be sitting around pretending to be first-class, having, in reality, nothing to do,” he wrote in a Medium post. “I had a T-Mobile prepaid SIM on a spare phone with no active service, so I came up with a laugh mission: should I somehow get access to the internet without a data plan?”
He could, and it turns out. Ajit found that T-Cellular permits gadgets related to its LTE network to get access to some websites and servers without an account. That unfastened get entry extends to Ookla’s Speedtest app, which pings a nearby server to check the phone’s upload and download speeds. Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company. By setting up his oroxy server, Ajit can spoof T-Cell into questioning that the information he was accessing came from Speedtest, whilst in reality, his hacked connection had free rein of the net.
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“Similar to that, I now had access to information at some point in the T-Mobile community without maintaining any form of formal payments or settlement,” he wrote. “Just my phone’s radios speaking to the network’s radios, free of any artificial shackles.” He stated that it in principle, it’d be spotless for T-Mobile to smell out such a proxy that was attempting to impersonate an allowed server. All they’d need to do is restrict their admission to the servers on Speedtest’s public listing.
However, there are loads of servers, and there are probably different websites and apps that T-Cell may want non-subscribers to have got right of entry to, so imposing the sort of allowlist could be a tedious challenge. T-Cellular has not answered PCMag’s request to comment on whether or not it plans to restore Ajit’s loophole. Still, his publicly available proxy server was not operating as of Friday afternoon.
