Sony has been having its fair share of problems with the PlayStation for a long time, and this time the PS3 has been hacked again. A hacker group calling themselves ‘The Three Musketeers’ have been able to break into one of the critical security modules in the firmware. The hackers have infiltrated the cryptographic signature of the console, known in other words as the LV0 key, that will allow the hackers to install custom firmware and enable them to bypass any restrictions that Sony puts on the platform. It will also make it easier to procure the PSN authentication keys and enable hardware with hacked firmware to break into the online network. This is obviously expected to promote piracy which has been the main concern that Sony has been wanting to put an end to. The hacker group claims in its release that they were not planning to make the keys public, but were forced to do so because someone leaked the information to another group called ‘BlueDiskCFW’, which intended to release a paid version of the custom firmware with the leaked keys. According to The Three Musketeers, “We just thought you should know that we’re disappointed in certain people. You can be sure that if it wouldn’t have been for this leak, this
key would never have seen the light of day, only the fear of our work being used by others to make money out of it has forced us to release this now.” The release of these LV0 keys is something that is expected to be a huge setback to Sony, which hasn’t yet released a statement acknowledging or commenting on the breach. But what looks certain is the fact that it will be unable to re-secure the platform as it did before with the security update to block fail0verflow group’s hack that exploited the platform with the PSJailbreak dongle. This is due to the fact that the LV0 keys are like the master keys for the firmware which will leave out very limited options for the company to proceed with. It is yet to be seen however what the actual implications are and how it affects other users as a whole.
