Oh Sony is actually cooked now.
I give it a month before unlocked PS5s are everywhere, and maybe six months to an year before a full on PS5 emulator. Brazilians in general LOVE hacked consoles and pirated games, hell the PS2 and Xbox 360 were extremely popular here for that exact reason.
This is literally the Gol D. Roger Execution moment for us.
It’s really not. Literally the same thing happened with the PS3, arguably that was much worse and it didn’t cook Sony at all.
Piracy never ever actually hurts big companies. Game consoles make their entire business on selling “just plug it in and click the prompts and play the game, ezpz” as a lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how fully hacked a console is or how easy it is to hack them, the percentage of users that’ll mod and pirate is always miniscule.
Look at sales numbers for Pokemon X and Y, which released when the 3DS was ironclad. Compare them to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which released when 3DS piracy required a $100 flashcart and an ancient system firmware with no downgrade route. Compare those to Pokémon Sun and Moon, which released when five minutes with an SD card and a magnet would let you pirate the game directly from Nintendo’s own fucking server, complete with fully functional online play. Notice a pattern? No you don’t, they all sold like hotcakes.
Every first party Nintendo game released after 2016 other than Super Mario Odyssey was available to pirates before legitimate buyers, until the Switch 2 came out. That entire near decade of Nintendo was exclusively releasing games for compromised platforms. Nintendo did pretty well financially during that period, I’d say. Wii piracy was trivial as soon as the Twilight Hack dropped, yet late life Wii games sold gangbusters. And on the Wii, pirates legitimately got a better product because they got to bypass the Wii’s dogshit DVD lens and disc load times. R4s and clones and upgrades existed for nearly the entire Nintendo DS lifespan. GBA games were playable on the PC before the console came out in the United States.
My dude, have you seen outside recently?
My dude, have you tried not being a cunt for no reason lately?
Sony isn’t even cooked, man. Piracy is a non issue to the bottom line. The Switch had this plus fully functional pirate installers in like, month 2 and Nintendo still sold a morbillion copies of TOTK despite all the hackable consoles on the market (and the maturity of emulators)
Strong ai slop vibes emanating from the article. It’s full of contradictions and listicles. Each section feels divorced from the others, and subsection titles are larger than section titles.
The information density feels way too high for something ai written, but at the very least they must’ve used an ai to fuck it up afterwards
Yeah, but the kids eat it up.
Skeptical that kids would read thecybersecguru.com
Check the comments. They’re eating it up.
Yeah I checked the twitter profiles of the two people mentioned, one doesnt talk about it at all and the other says it’s not what people think and it won’t enable CFW.
AI nonsense.
Yeah agreed especially further down when it’s just randomly rehashing old history. It’s also mixing up decryption and verification even in the beginning of the article. First they write:
BootROM (Level 0): The CPU runs code burned into it at the factory. This code is immutable (cannot be changed). It uses the ROM Keys to verify the signature of the next loader.
Then just two paragraphs below:
The ROM Keys change everything. With these keys, hackers can decrypt the Level 1 Bootloader.
So which is it? Usually bootloaders in a chain hash the next stage. That hash is compared with the signed hash the stage presents, and the signature on the signed hash is cryptographically verified against the locally stored trusted keys. No encryption or decryption takes place. Maybe this is different for the PS5 but then that would be noteworthy, not something you just assume readers to know.
decryption is when cryptography
Maybe I am missing something but I think you answers your own question?
ROM is Level 0, it has the burned-in, permanent key. It hashes and verifies the Level 1 bootloader, on disk, signed with the ROM key.
Now that the ROM key is known, anyone can sign a PS5 bootloader; and you can pretty much do whatever you want from there.
It would seem that all existing PS5s just went up in value.
That was a rhetorical question after I pointed out the inconsistency: The author claimed they keys were for verification and then also said they were used to decrypt.
That’s most likely bullshit, and if it isn’t they should explain the unusual setup in detail instead of glossing over it.
Time to do the jump from ps2 to ps5 this 2026
think so?
Why is it always game consoles that get these leaks and not like, phone firmware or gpu vbios
Good news, a new exploit has been recently found that can unlock the boot loader of several older Sony phones, even the Japanese models which were not unlockable until the discovery!
xperable - Xperia ABL fastboot Exploit [CVE-2021-1931]
As someone else pointed out, there’s a shit ton of different phones. In 2012 alone, how many different “Samsung Galaxy …” did samsung release? Wikipedia lists 6
That’s 1 company, with 1 brand name in 1 year. Each with different hardware and as of late those phones have been harder and harder to even open. However, there’s a handful of models of “PS5” standard, slim, pro. They are also very easy to open requiring regular tools your average joe is likely to have, in fact sony encourages this in case you want to upgrade your SSD. It’s a lot harder to keep a system secure if the user can poke and prod the hardware, i mean the Wii’s security was literally beaten by tweezers
I think it’s just the amount of love for game consoles is much higher than phones, where people are a bit complacent.
I do agree it should happen more often.
Also there are SO many phones.
There’s only a few ps5s. I’m not sure if they share the same code that’s been leaked here but probably.
Consoles have extremely limited variations, less variables to mess with. A ps5 is a ps5, but a Samsung Galaxy 25 isn’t the same as a Samsung Galaxy FE25
Ps5 pro, ps5 slim, ps5 digital edition? Nintendo Switch (Erista), Nintendo Switch (Mariko), Nintendo Switch OLED, Nintendo Switch Lite?
Even those variations have minimal or no overlap on store shelves. It’s still way fewer models to deal with regardless.
But if Samsung’s firmware keys or whatever leaked, wouldn’t that apply to all of them? It’s not like they reinvent all their infrastructure for each phone.
Actually, I take it back. These things do happen in the mobile world, they’re just not released publicly. Celebrite etc just gobble them up
Their infrastructure likely enables individual keys for every model, it doesn’t need to change.
I have a PS5 that I rarely turn on. Everything ends up on PC. PC handhelds better than a PS Portal. To phone streaming everything supports. Playing PC games on Android is a thing now. Switch handles party gaming. No replacing Mario party/kart/tennis/strikers/golf. Nintendo IP party games are OP
What I’m interested in are the insights the PS5 will give into PS4 architecture. PS5 is backwards compatible and seeing what the PS5 does to accommodate any problematic games in BC. PS4 emulation over 5 because 4 is well along. PS5 is deep in the no console exclusives era. Early PS4 still had semblance of third party exclusives and Japanese games skipping PC
I unplugged the PS5 Ethernet port just in case I ever want to do something in the future. I doubt it besides possibly future of running Linux on it. It’d make a great gaming PC someday as a gift. People always talk about exclusives as a reason for consoles. I play way more games on PC that aren’t available on consoles. Too old and abandoned. Too indie so it may not show up for years if ever on consoles.
Hopefully the Xbox series X gets jail broken someday too. They’d be great values for gaming PCs
We barely turned our PS5 on until about a year and a half ago, it was the Switch that was getting all our love. Now we have a Switch 2 we barely touch and the PS5 gets attention cause games are on sale (nobody bought it lol)
I do PC game, but I prefer console because there’s WAY less fiddling and tinkering due to hardware issues or shitty game ports. I was excited for the FFVII steam sale until I saw the reviews complaining about stuttering and performance issues. I prefer a painless, boot-it-up-and-play-immediately experience over modding capability.
nobody bought the ps5?
Key Figures & Estimates (Late 2025/Early 2026)
PlayStation 5 (PS5): ~84-86 million units (crossing 80M mark by late 2025).
Xbox Series X/S: ~34 million units (estimates vary, but well behind PS5).
Nintendo Switch (Original): ~154 million units (still selling well, nearing DS).
Nintendo Switch 2 (New): Starting sales with ~12.4 million units by late 2025 (estimated).
84 mil seems like a lot. PS games have always been discounted, contrary to Nintendo games
It seems it’s not widely known. But the Xbox series X is hacked. The PS5 has been hacked for a while too. This is just gonna make the hacks a lot better. 
I will not post the keys here for legal reasons.
One paragraph later posts a picture of the xit.
I just want to be able to back up my saves to usb
If ps5 hack will allow running linux on it, i will run linux on it.
That is already possible, but the hacks to get it actually to run are quite annoying and limited to a few older versions AFAIK.
Hopefully with this you can just boot Linux normally on a PS5 in the nearish future. Would definitely make for a nice Steam Machine.
Would definitely make for a nice Steam Machine.
That would be absolutely brilliant!
That’s what I wanna do with my PS5 make it a steam machine
You know you’re crooked when “users can run the software they want on their own hardware” causes the sky to fall.
And EU is pounding Apple to get 3rd party app stores on its platform.
Meanwhile at Sony:
Not comparable.
I think it is comparable. A ps5 is hardware. Sony is under no obligation to provide a 3rd party operating system, but they should also not restrict you from creating or deploying one yourself on the hardware you own. Fundamentally, this should also extend to running software from any vendor you choose (a third party App Store). Sony artificially restricts your choice to only buying from them, and only running firmware and software they distribute. This is not dissimilar from iOS or Android or other hardware vendors that lock you in and lock down your hardware.
Yeah, this is a boon for the end user, and a loss for rootkit distributor Sony.
I doubt it but if true I will put Bazzite on mine.
Let me guess, they sunk their battleship?
Now we are getting somewhere
Sony has no competition right now in their market so they will be fine. Besides the PS6 isn’t to far away.
This is really cool, fuck Sony
I’m not much for understanding all of the lingo, so I’m wondering if this is something I could do on my own. I would love to make my ps5 my “smart” tv and no longer have to use Google’s services.
Also, installing RetroArch on it would be super sweet. Will this all be possible for a low level user, or will I need an expert to put Linux on it so I can customize my rig?
My second question that wasn’t quite clear was if I could have my psn account and still play online while changing the os. I still want to play with my friends online while being able to load other apps. I know if it’s detected I changed things I’ll get locked out, but how will they tell?
Coming from previous console hacks…
It generally does require a halfway decent techie background to hack a console (or anything, like jailbreaking a phone). At the very least, being able to follow guides exactly to the letter or risk bricking a device.
Generally speaking, hacking a console will not let you play online.
You generally don’t want to put a hacked console on the internet at all to keep it from being potentially flagged from the parent service like PSN
Now, this could all be different depending on the actual hack, but it’s what’s been true for previous ones.
Thank you. I figured it’d likely be too hard for me to do, but being able to get someone to mod my machine is pretty sweet. I might wait for a bit longer to do it, but I’m liking where this is going. And if I could run steam on it, I might just do it right away so I can play those games instead of my PS ones. Most games are cross platform now anyways.
Ever since Sony and Nintendo switched to paid online that has no longer been the con it used to be for me. Back for the PS3 I didn’t jailbreak it since online was free, but for the switch and ps4 I didn’t hesitate.
If this is something you want to try for yourself, either buy a second PS5 and use a burner account on it, or be prepared for the possibility of losing your entire PSN account. This goes for pretty much any internet-enabled console modding.
Nintendo deactivated a 10+ year old account of mine when I tried modding a Wii a while back. It wasn’t a huge deal at the time, because I still had physical copies of most of my games at that point. But these days, my library is almost entirely digital, so I keep separate fuck-around accounts so that I don’t find-out with an account I’ve spent money on.
