Tesco hand scanners hacked as buyer blasts out Metallica after ‘easy trick’

A Tesco handheld customer scanner has been hacked to blast out Metallica across the store. According to a post from a customer on Reddit, the scanner’s boot/loading screen was bypassed, with the person managing to find that the devices are actually running on an old version of the Android operating system.

They then connected it to the in-store customer WiFi and opened up the YouTube app, before playing one of the heavy metal band’s most legendary tunes – Master of Puppets (remastered). A photo of the device, lined up among other scanners showing the Tesco Clubcard home screen, shows the album cover on the screen, and the layout of a simple android device around it.

The person posted the image with the caption: “I somehow managed to get a hand scanner not to boot the SAYS (own-brand) software and connected it to the customer WiFi and started playing Metallica.”

And fellow Tesco staffers flooded the comments with more details about what can be done with the scanners. One said: “These handhelds are literally Android phone with a barcode scanner in a funny case. Neat someone managed to get out of the app and open YouTube.”

And another wrote: “They also have pretty good speakers on them as me and some other staff took it in turns to play different songs.” A third wrote, detailing exactly how it’s done: “You need to wait till they are being reset and when it starts the software loading press the back button / home button and it should kick it to the base android system, then open Google and connect to the customer WiFi and bingo you have a ready to use android device.”

This comment caused anger from one person claiming to be an engineer, who replied: “Im one of the engineers that repairs these devices, stop giving away the secrets lol!”

Hacks are also available at Sainsbury’s, as one person wrote: “In Sainsburys our reporting software opens in Chrome (on our regular handsets) so you can easily access whatever you want from there.”

Tesco has been approached for comment.

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