9 year old Reuben Paul who is CEO of Prudent Games, delivers a keynote address at cyber security conference and demonstrates how dangerous phone hacking is
Meet Reuben Paul. The Harmony School of Science third-grader has accomplished more in nine years than some adults accomplish in a lifetime.
Reuben Paul is pretty well known in cyber security circles for a 9 year old boy because of his exploits. He is also the CEO of Austin, Texas based Prudent Games.
“He’s pretty well known in the computer security industry, you know, I think if you track computer security in general, people are going to know about Reuben, he’s been a keynote at a number of other conferences, so he definitely has the chops, ” said Richard Stephens, Organizer of “Security B-sides” Conference.
On Friday he delivered a keynote address to a spellbound crowd at the conference at the Wingate in Round Rock on the dangers of phone hacking and demonstrated how its done within minutes.
A video from the conference filed by Fox is given below
Reuben showed the delegates how it took him only a few steps to hack into a Android smartphone. He achieved the hack with a malicious download which looked to be a “real” game.
Taking a five minute break in between his address he achieved the task in 15 minutes. The crowd that had gathered to watch and hear the whizkid couldn’t believe how easy he made the task look simple.
“Once I got that on, I did a webcam stream, I dumped their contacts, I dumped their call logs, and messages, and I also located where they were,” Reuben said.
His parents say they knew at the tender age of five , his child was special. Speaking to Fox, his father, Mano Paul said, “He’d use the words like “firewall” and things like that and repeat them back to me. First I was totally surprised. I didn’t realize a kid would be able to understand and pick up those things.”
He ended his keynote address with a sombre note of how real threat, phone hacking is. “If a child can do it then a regular hacker can do it, which it’ll super easy for a regular hacker to do it, so I just want everybody to be aware that be more careful when you download games and stuff like that,” he said
Cyber security isnt Reuben’s only forte, he was crowned as America’s Most Beautiful Baby. He also does gymnastics, swims, plays Inline Hockey, and takes lessons in music (piano and drums). And he is the youngest person in America to receive the Shaolin Do Kung Fu Black Belt.