Malware turns PSP into expensive brick

by admin October 8, 2005 at 3:38 pm

PSP users are being urged to beware of a Trojan which, once executed, turns their games gizmo into little more than an expensive book weight. The (PlayStation Portable) PSP Brick Trojan poses as a utility that allows gamers to run homebrew apps or pirated games.

The latest version 2.0 of the PSP firmware stops the execution of custom code on the device. But after the discovery of a buffer overflow in version 2.0 of the PSP firmware, a firmware downgrade to 1.50 became the “Holy Grail” of PSP homebrew development.

Various firmware dowgrade tools sprung up. But one of the utilities has turned out to be a Trojan that renders the PSP unusable. The malware poses as software from the “PSP Team”. In reality the code will remove important system files from the flash which makes the system unbootable or a brick, as gamers call it.

Read more: The Register