PlayStation 4 Game Hack Lets PS4 Owners Play Pirated Games Using Raspberry Pi
A new PlayStation 4 game hack allows game pirates to share PS4 games and consoles essentially without limit, according to GameZone. Reportedly developed by Russians and publicized by Brazilian retailers, it only takes a Raspberry Pi and three days to recreate the hack.
According to Tech Times, anyone with a PS4 can copy its BIOS/NAN, game database, and operating system onto a $99 Raspberry Pi, and transfer the copy to another PS4 – as many as someone would want.
Brazilian retailers publicized the PS4 game hack last week when they offered to recreate it for consumers for anywhere from $100 to $150 for the service, with 10 pirated games included, according to Wololo.
PlayStation 4 owners would likely find the game hack worth the risk of a suspended account or worse, as authentic PS4 games cost upwards of $60 or more. At $15 a piece in Brazil, PS4 owners are saving a bundle of money.
What makes this PlayStation game hack even more desirable for PS4 owners is that it is not a hack or a jailbreak in the same way other consoles are hacked or jailbroken, according to GameZone.
Because the Raspberry Pi method does not touch any actual code, nothing is being hacked or jailbroken in the true, legal sense of the words.
The Raspberry Pi method is simply a way to play pirated games on a retail PlayStation 4 console. Furthermore, according to a Brazilian website UOL Jogos(via Google Translate), Sony has no way of knowing whether the hacked PS4 was playing pirated games or not – even if playing online.
UOL Jogos went to a Brazilian game retailer selling the PlayStation 4 game hack service and confirmed the hack is real. UOL received two accounts and 10 random games as part of the information dump onto their PS4 console.
Brett Fernicola, Stealthbuilt Technologies’ CISO, essentially confirmed this information via Tech News Talk when he talked about the differences between the PS3 game hack and the PS4 game hack. According to Fernicola, the PS3 “unit itself needed a hacked firmware loaded” and the PS4 doesn’t.
According to a commenter on the UOL Jogos Facebook page (before UOL Jogos took the information down), via Wololo, the PS4 game hack isn’t a hack, per se. It isn’t a jailbreak either, he insists, since it doesn’t change or decrypt the firmware or software.
The commenter insisted that it is “a real bypass” of the “ASM code for follow ROM/BIOS reading using a Pi … very simple and old technique from the MSX age.”
He added that it was possible because Sony “forgot to hardlock inside the CPU/APU, the real hashcode for the bios [sic].”
UOL Jogos claims Russians developed the PS4 game hack, but Wololo refutes this assertion, and pointed out the PS4 game hack seems to be “inspired from a similar technique on the PS3 that is widely known.”
According to Drops de Jogos(via Google Translate), Sony hired Trench, Rossi e Wantanabe to send cease and desist letters to Brazilian retailers offering the PlayStation 4 game hack service on April 29, although Sony has yet to comment about the PS4 hack publicly.
[Photo Credits: Eric Thayer/Getty Images, Raspberry Pi, Element14]
