The PS4 Is Now FULLY JAILBROKEN--What Does This Mean For The PS5?

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 13 December 2021, 10:12 pm

PS4 consoles have finally been blown wide open courtesy of a new hack, according to Kotaku.

(Photo : Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
BANGKOK, THAILAND - 2018/05/24: A Sony PlayStation 4 video game console with a red wireless controller next to it. The PlayStation 4 or PS4 is knows as the eighth generation of home video game console developed by the Japanese company Sony Interactive Entertainment. The console sold for about 74 million units since it was released in November 2013.

The aforementioned hack/exploit now allows for a PlayStation 4 console to be fully jailbroken, roughly eight years after the system was first revealed. As a result, almost anybody can now run homebrew applications and even pirated games on their last-gen Sony consoles.

Furthermore, the exploit seems to work on the console's latest 9.00 version firmware or earlier.

The jailbreak, called "pOOBs4," is the culmination of the work of several people: SpecterDev, Znullptr, and ChendoChap, who some might call hackers-but likely think of themselves as developers.

However, it is said that their work wouldn't have been possible with help from TheFlow, who allegedly aided in the project by discovering a single bug in the console's filesystem that makes the exploit work.

TheFlow (Andy Nguyen in real life) is well-known in the PlayStation community as a "hacking god," having posted multiple hacks on GitHub that covered several earlier firmware versions for the last-gen console.

Here is a Twitter video of the exploit's custom firmware working on a console with the 9.00 firmware:

9.👀 (awesome work by chendochap & @Znullptr) pic.twitter.com/ME12bLyu3C
— Specter (@SpecterDev) December 13, 2021

As of this writing, the pOOBs4 jailbreak is now available on GitHub for those who might want to try it out on their own.

But first, let it be known that we at Tech Times do not condone the use of homebrew software and other hacks-including pirated video games-on your PS4 or any console.So use this exploit at your own risk.

Nevertheless, this news could be a welcome sight to those who have been stuck with their last-gen PlayStation consoles for the past year.

What Will This PS4 Jailbreak Mean For The PS5?

With the PlayStation 4 now being fully jailbroken, does this mean the current-gen PS5 will also be vulnerable soon? The answer is simple: it is likely, given recent news.

(Photo : Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images via Getty Images)
Living room with a Sony PlayStation 5 home video game console and DualSense controller alongside a television, taken on November 3, 2020.

A hacking group calling themselves Fail0verflow announced back in early November that they managed to acquire the encryption rootkeys of the new Sony console.

As such, this brings them to crafting the first PS5 jailbreak-though there's still work to be done. Here is their announcement of the hack on Twitter:

Translation: We got all (symmetric) ps5 root keys. They can all be obtained from software - including per-console root key, if you look hard enough! https://t.co/ulbq4LOWW0
— fail0verflow (@fail0verflow) November 8, 2021

The hack can be considered impressive by some, given how the hackers said that they didn't have to modify the console itself to get in.

It used to be tough to jailbreak a PlayStation console due to Sony's efforts of making the systems secure. To break through, a physical modification will have to be done. But for this hack, Fail0verflow says they only had to tinker with the software.

Given that the PS4 has now been fully hacked, there is a good possibility that its newer, more powerful successor might come soon. Sony will also inevitably catch wind of this news and move forward to secure their current-gen system from hackers even further.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce