PS4 is now officially jailbroken, says hacker

Hacking is not a new thing in gaming, but one hacker who goes by the name of CTurt has crossed the territory of the PS4 with his jailbreaking technique. CTurt has claimed that his kernel exploit has officially jailbroken PS4. What it does it to alleged help hacked or modded content run on the PS4.

CTurt posted the information on his Twitter account. The PlayStation 4 jailbreak that CTurt was talking about can open the doors to piracy in gaming for the console. The hack allows dumping system memory (RAM) from other processes. For an easy understanding, with jailbreaking, people will be able to modify the original firmware of the console. The customised firmware will give people the ability to run pirated content. However creating such custom firmware is not easy and it takes time. But, the exploit may unite hackers in groups.

The news will certainly sadden the Sony, and the company will surely work to eliminate any vulnerability in firmware. Sony might also seek to take legal action against people who encourage pirated applications and games and then try to run them on console. CTurt is now one of those people who have challenged the tech giants.

CTurt may remind many people of George Hotz, the first man who jailbroke iPhone and became popular as "geohot." In 2010, Hotz also discovered an exploit in Sony's PS3. The Verge reported that the exploit was used to reactivate the discontinued option called OtherOS which could be used to install third-party Operating System. Finally, Sony filed a lawsuit against Hotz. Those who want to install third-party software on their Xbox One or PlayStation 4 should know that it is still considered illegal.

At the moment, the kernel exploit only works for the 1.76 version of the PlayStation 4. But this exploit can be tweaked to work on more recent version of PS4 firmware, SoftPedia reported. Of course, if hackers find ways to make this exploit work on other firmware, it could unfortunately fill the PlayStation 4 devices with pirated games and third party applications. No official statement is from the Sony Playstation officials until now.

Game piracy is a strong force in video game industry. Because of piracy, game developers, publishers and retailers have taken several steps towards Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies and techniques to discourage pirates from stealing their material.

Some developers have even created pirated game-specific bugs to annoy hackers. PCWorld reported that EA created blurry pixels that appear during gameplay if the player has an illegitimate copy of "The Sims 4." The developer of "Serious Sam 3" found a great way to protect material from hackers. What the developer did was to create an invincible pink scorpion that chases the player beating the character in every run.

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