May 15, 2015, 15:13 pm
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtm...y_id=97447
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Sony PS4 Hit with New Game Pirating Hack
By Jennifer LeClaire / Sci-Tech Today
A new game pirating hack has targeted Sony’s PlayStation 4 (PS4). Gamezone is reporting that the hack is coming from a Russian Web site that Brazilian retailers are leveraging to make a quick buck.
Sony was not immediately available for comment, but Gamezone reported that Brazilian retailers are helping customers hack their consoles and have 10 games installed for $100 to $150. Each additional game is $15.
We turned to Brett Fernicola, CISO at cybersecurity solutions firm Stealthbits Technologies, to get his thoughts on the hack. So far, it appears different from the PS3 hack that Sony squashed several years ago, he told us.
“The trick with the PS3 was that the actual unit itself needed a hacked firmware loaded. Then any game that was copied to disk or Blu-ray was easily playable both online and offline,” Fernicola said. “If you stayed offline you could play your games forever until a new game came out that required a more recent firmware to load.”
In that case, you needed to obtain a new hacked version of that firmware, he said. If you connected one of these hacked PS3s to the Internet, Sony could easily detect you had a bogus firmware and could shut you down.
“If this new hack does not require modification to the actual firmware of the PS4 then I think Sony is in for trouble. However, the details of the article don’t go deep enough to really pick this apart yet,” Fernicola said. “If the clean retail PS4, including its NAN/BIOS, is being cloned to another clean retail PS4, one would have to assume once online Sony would be able to detect duplicated or cloned machines.”
The Impact of Piracy
That said, Fernicola’s opinion is that piracy in general has little effect on the market. That's because there will always be people willing to buy the retail version to support their favorite artists and developers so the amount of time and money spent defeating the pirates would be better spent somewhere else, he said.
We reached out to TK Keanini, CTO of security intelligence firm Lancope, to get his perspective. As a PS4 and Xbox gamer, he told us that the integrity of the game is not only a matter of piracy but a matter of game play.
“Game developers must develop advanced methods of checking the integrity of the game at runtime as a certain percentage of gamers hack the game so that they can have an unfair advantage in competition,” Keanini said. “When this happens, most folks stop playing the game and the community moves to another game. Gamers don't mind losing as long as they have lost in fairness. These cheats sometimes allow competitors to hide in walls or aimbots giving them 100 percent accuracy. No one likes cheaters.”
The Arms Race
Gavin Reid, Vice President of threat intelligence at Lancope, told us vendors in this space are aggressively targeted by thieves who want to remove copy [url=http://www.newsfactor.com/accuserve/accuserve-go.php?c=16793]protection[/url] -- and the PS4 is no different. Sony will continue to play an arms race against groups that can find a way to copy and share games, he said.
“[There are] open source groups like Homebrew with more altruistic motivations of extending the functionality of the console alongside groups selling modified consoles specifically to play copied games and, of course, the reseller of the games themselves at a fraction of the actuals costs,” Reid said. “This has happened historically with all of the major consoles. It would be highly unlikely not to continue with the PS4.”It's time.
