Avast Threat Labs research sheds light on the security risks related to jailbreaking gaming consoles
As Covid-19 has forced many of us to stay home more than usual, an increasing number has started looking for in-house entertainment. Putting it simply, people are gaming — a lot.
While some people have dug up their old Gameboys, others have stuck to the more traditional gaming consoles, including PlayStations. It might not come as a surprise that some gamers have actively been looking for ways to play their favorite PlayStation games, free of charge.
Here's where device jailbreaking comes into play. It doesn't take much to find information on how to jailbreak a PlayStation — custom firmware and jailbreaks make up the largest, most propagated, and visible part of the PlayStation hack scene. And because PlayStation is a non-general-purpose computing system (gaming console), Sony wants to protect it from any unauthorized usage, including custom firmware installation.
What does jailbreaking mean for gaming console security?
When someone decides to jailbreak their device, a common question is whether or not the jailbreaking process will jeopardize the security of their device. With this question in mind, Avast Threat Labs set out to gain an understanding of the security threats that affect users who act outside of the PlayStation Network (PSN), which is the official PlayStation user ecosystem.
To illustrate this, our team built our own custom firmware for the PS3 and tried to introduce code of our choosing. Overall, the team was surprised to find that it was a simple procedure, since there is playstation secure avast
