This wasn’t exactly the best week in Digital Foundry history – last week, one of our staff members received a succession of emails to make the blood run cold. Two-factor authentication disabled, passwords changed, backup security codes re-issued. And then? The Digital Foundry YouTube channel gets an instant brand makeover (we’re Space-X now) and we’re live-streaming some kind of Russian crypto-scam video to over a thousand people. Figuring out what actually happened, locking out the intruder and deleting the ‘Space-X’ video didn’t take long and eager to get the show back on the road, we rolled out our Forza Horizon 5 PC analysis. Only to discover that about five hours later, YouTube decided to delete the channel – presumably some kind of delayed reaction to the takeover (we never found out why exactly). For reasons unknown, it took a further 18 hours to get the channel restored and we’re still not clear on how Google’s 2FA was defeated. Obviously it was a stressful couple of days, but looking back it’s the complete void of information surrounding the episode that is the most frustrating thing of all.
But we’re not the only ones being hacked – recently, we’ve also seen two specific hacks for PlayStation 5, arriving around a year after the console launched, which is unusually early. Two ‘legit’ hackers are involved, both with proven track records. The fail0verflow team and ‘TheFloW’ saw PS5 compromised in two entirely different ways. The former appear to have decrypted the secure bootloader on PS5, acquiring root keys that allow them to decrypt and crucially to encrypt PS5 system software files. It is far from a complete hack but from the looks of it, it does seem like the keys to the kingdom have been acquired. The latter hack is an actual application of exploits unknown: it sees the debug settings menu from development hardware running on a retail PlayStation 5.
About Author
