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A Teenage Hacker Figured Out How To Get Free Data On His Phone (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Jacob Ajit is 17 and he just hacked his way to getting free phone data, presumably so that he can do whatever it is that teens do online these days without alerting his parents with overage fees. According to a Medium post Ajit posted on Wednesday, he made his discovery while playing around with a prepaid T-Mobile phone with no service. The phone was still able to connect to the network, although it would only take him to a T-Mobile portal asking him to renew the prepaid phone plan. For some reason, though, Ajit wrote that his internet speed test app still worked, albeit through a T-Mobile server. Ajit figured out that he was able to access media sent from any folder labelled "/speedtest," possibly because T-Mobile whitelists media files from speed tests regardless of the host. He tested his theory by setting up a "/speedtest" folder on his own site and filled it with media, including a Taylor Swift music video, which he was able to access. Ajit writes that he then created a proxy server that allows users to access any site with this method. All a T-Mobile user has to do is go to this page and input any URL they want to visit. "Just like that, I now had access to data throughout the T-Mobile network without maintaining any sort of formal payments or contract," Ajit wrote on Medium. "Just my phone's radios talking to the network's radios, free of any artificial shackles."
We did this years ago on GSM / PPP sessions (remember when you connected a laptop via IR and dialed a number to get internet access?).
Set up a VPN server to listen on port 53 UDP somewhere on the internet, then connect to it from your laptop via the phone.
Used to be able to buy a $2 sim card, and pass hundreds of MB per day (which was a lot at the time) with zero restrictions.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
That whitelisting for speedtests also applies to unactivated SIMs and prepaid SIMs without active service (e.g. due to nonpayment or zero balance.)
I used to keep a spare phone lying about with an unactivated SIM while I had a prepaid SIM, and discovered the speedtest whitelisting was unconditional. I never thought to dig any deeper into it, although I suspected this type of thing was possible all along.
Glad to have my suspicions confirmed without having to risk my ass.
Back in 2000 I had one of those AOL CD's that they liked to shove into everyone's mailbox. The would give you so many free hours, but you still needed a credit card. I remember going through the motions of signing up but stopping short of inputting my CC info, as I didn't have one at the time. There was a part of the sign up that searched for a list of local phone numbers. During that time you were connected to the net.I would switch to a real browser, Netscape at the time, and sure enough I was surfing a 56k. The connection would usually time out a about 20 to 30 minutes and I would have to try again, but it still worked.