And so it begins: the PS4, hacked

A year and six months is all it took a group of Brazilian hackers to jailbreak the PS4 – or so these people claim.

PS4 hacked

According to a report from Brazilian website UOL, Brazil is already seeing its first wave of “jailbroken” (AKA hacked) PS4 consoles, with many pre-loaded games inside them. This has nothing to do with the infamous shared account system, but is instead a process of soldering a chip into the console, and then “connecting a laptop and loading the games”.

“What we do is turn a console into a clone of another. We copy the information of the bios and its processor[…] Everything bought on a PS4 can be copied to another system, and this is in itself a better system than shared accounts”. The process uses a Raspberry Pi, and is already being offered in several stores of Sao Paulo. It costs in between $100 and $133 USD, and then the store returns the console to the user, preloaded with games. Seemingly, these games can even be updated and played online without any issues

The UOL team claims to have tried out this system, which does allegedly work. According to these hackers, the idea behind this hack comes from Rusia.

The truth is, even if this was relatively quick – compared to what happened with the PS3, at least – this is a common occurrence in the console world and the video game industry when it comes to popular video game consoles. Ever since the PlayStation 1 and all the way to the Xbox 360, Wii and Dreamcast, all consoles have eventually fallen prey to hackers, and companies have had to live with that.

Regardless of how effective and functional this hack is – there is no reason to not trust UOL, who are themselves a reputable news source – we still don’t know how Sony will react. Probably with an eventual firmware update patching this vulnerability. Time will tell.

In the meanwhile, Sony haven’t made any comments.

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