Since its debut, the Sony PlayStation Classic console has been well-received despite the limited number of pre-installed games on it. Not long after, the retro console was found to be running on quad-core ARM chipset and had 16GB of storage inside of it. Now, hackers have discovered that it has a serious flaw that could effectively allow them to run additional games on it directly from a USB drive.
The shoddy security flaw was first discovered when two console hackers by the name of yifanlu and madmonkey1907 were dumping the console’s system code on to an external machine. It was during that process that the hackers found the key that was embedded on the device itself. Instead of a private key that is usually exclusive only to Sony.
As one would expect, the hackers wasted no time in trying to crack the retro console and get it to run other PlayStation games that aren’t a part of the original list. In the case of yifanlu, the hacker had successfully managed to run Crash Bandicoot on the console via a USB drive, as seen in the video below.
The tool that yifanlu and madmonkey1907 used to hack the console is known as BleemSync, and can be found on GitHub. Of course, it goes without saying that if you’re going to attempt this, there’s a chance that you’ll brick your PlayStation Classic if done wrong.
(Source: Ars Technica via Hot Hardware)
