For those of you who have been spending the first week of the new year nursing headaches, replacing broken stuff, or eating leftovers, you may not have heard that the ‘infamous’ hacker ‘Geohot’…George Hotz (seriously?), the guy famed for busting open the iPhone platform for all sorts of evil purposes, has decrypted some kind of “root key” on the PS3.
To you and me that basically means he has hacked past the latest firmware update administered by Sony a month or so back (3.55), which was designed to give additional security features to the console. Apparently it wasn’t enough to stop ‘Geohot’.
So now his console can run unauthorized code. Sony spoke to Edge yesterday, saying:
“We are aware of this, and are currently looking into it. We will fix the issues through network updates, but because this is a security issue, we are not able to provide you with any more details.”
And to make things even more interesting, hackers have been boasting to the BBC that because the console has been “completely compromised”, the only way Sony can get back on top of things, is to issue brand new hardware, which for obvious reasons won’t deal with the problem.
Sony is keeping fairly quiet about this though, and whether or not the planned update will succeed, is yet to been seen. Jailbreak guru Mr. Hotz has meanwhile been posting up videos showing off his ‘achievement’.
These guys are probably going to continue to be a pain in Sony’s ass until the PS3 team properly deal with them. But as it stands, the score is (unfortunately) 1-0.
