PS4’s Security Destroyed By Random Messages
If you think the Ewoks defeating the Empire doesn’t make sense, you’ll love learning that mere punctuation came closer to destroying PlayStation than Microsoft and Nintendo could ever hope to. When facing cheaters, one usually gets accustomed to the idea of losing the game. For a while, however, you really did stand to lose your entire system. Back in 2018, hackers found a fatal flaw on the PS4 that hackers used to send consoles on an infinite crash loop.
To make this work, hackers only had to send a specific message to the user they wanted to nuke. The code wasn’t even anything that read like a curse adapted to the internet age or anything; it just needed to contain a specific character that the PS4 couldn’t process.
To get hurt, users didn’t even need to open the message. The cursed code was so strong that just by receiving it, your PS4 would instantly go on a vacation to the shadowlands. The exploit got so “popular” that even Sony, not knowing exactly what to do, just told people to disable their inbox. While the glitch responsible for the exploit didn’t really kill the consoles, they’d need to go through a “simple” procedure …