While Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox have been pretty much been hacked wide open for piracy, Sony’s PlayStation has largely remained shut. Sure there is a jailbreak, and some dongles that require a specific version of the PS3 firmware – but it keeps ‘em off the PSN and is largely beyond the scope of the layman. That might be changing.
Yesterday a PSN-enabled custom firmware was released that’s completely compatible with the current 4.25 PS3 firmware. That’s not unusual, and smart hacker types have been able to bypass the PSN restrictions anyway. What makes these new custom firmware a little more frightening is that the PlayStation 3’s LV0 keys have been released alongside them.
What the LV0 keys allow is for hackers to quickly and easily decrypt any PS3 firmware, and then re-encrypt them with the hack-happy 3.55 keys – allowing them to run, unrestricted, on hacked PS3’s. While the whole thing requires an already hacked PS3 right now, the LV0 keys being in the wild could soon change that – and we could see that damned perpetual cat-and-mouse firmware game between Sony and the hackers.
The group that released the hack, the Three Tuskateers, had apparently been sitting on the LV0 keys for ages – but had no intention of releasing them. that is, until a Chinese bunch of hackers stole the keys and intended to use them for profit.
"You can be sure that if it wouldn’t have been for this leak, this key would never have seen the light of day, only the fear of our work being used by others to make money out of it has forced us to release this now," a statement from the The Three Tuskateers says.
Of course, we’ve been through all of this before, when notorious hacker and complete douchenozzle GeoHot released the PS3’s root key, which was supposed to open the PS3 wide open, but ultimately resulted in not a damned thing happening. It remains to be seen if this is the hack that breaks the PS3.
Last Updated: October 24, 2012
