A discovery by a security engineer has opened the door to homebrew hacking on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles, paving the way for mods.
Gaming consoles are powerful machines that — in recent generations — have become similar to desktop computers in terms of hardware and capabilities. Despite all of that power, however, these gaming machines are nearly as locked down as smart TVs or other appliances. That includes the PlayStation 5, as Sony does its best to thwart any form of modification of the system. For better or worse, that hasn’t stopped hackers of all varieties from trying to find a backdoor into the console to take advantage of the power it has to offer. One such exploit was recently publicized, which has the PS5 and PS4 modding communities quite excited about the prospects of more open PlayStation boxes — unofficially, of course. Security engineer Andy Nguyen disclosed this news at a security conference (via GameRant), revealing how it is possible to run arbitrary code on the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles.
