When we first wrote about the PSJailbreak tool – the latest in a series of purported hacks intended to circumvent the PlayStation 3’s robust security precautions – we suggested that it might be a hoax. Notably, the screens shown to illustrate the tool at work were straight from a debug PlayStation 3; the same kind of PS3 that’s designed to run un-signed code off of things like hard drives and the like. It turns out we were partially correct. The always excellent Digital Foundry has weighed in on the topic and the takeaway is simple: “the PlayStation 3’s much vaunted security has finally been completely and unequivocally compromised.”
And how is it compromised? DF writes that the presence of the debug options “suggests that elements of the bespoke system updates used on the debug PS3s are being injected into the memory of the retail unit.” That coupled with the USB stick, which DF posits was likely reverse-engineered from the same “USB-based tools Sony uses to test and recover PS3s with corrupt firmware.”
PSJailbreak is real, is sold out, and is likely to get your console banned for using it originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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