Cracking the XBox 360

Now here's food for thought:  Do you think that any amount of security on a gaming system will stop crackers from reverse engineering it?

A group of crackers called Team PI Coder says it has discovered the basic workings of the console's file system.  The information has helped the group dig out the raw data from the console for 13 Xbox 360 games.

I'm going to go with "no" on that one.  What makes Microsoft think that their newest protection on the 360 is any different than the other systems to date?

A spokesman for Microsoft said there had been a series of improvements to the Xbox 360 that protect it against cracking.

He said that hardware on the system only allows Microsoft certified and signed programs to run on the console. This meant that copied games would not be recognised by the system and would not run.

Ahhhh!  So that's it!  Hardware based protection.  Maybe a bit like the last Xbox?  Oh, I'm sure it's improved, but when the challenge is there, there's a lot of engineers and reverse engineers that are going to be working on the problem to try to break the system.  Remember the last Xbox?  Yeah, the one that used a modchip to bypass the EEPROM (I think that was it)?  Well, it didn't last long, and neither will this one.

I'm not interested really, but it makes me mad that MS would have the balls to think that their system isn't breakable.  If it boils down to 1's and 0's, it's breakable.

Technorati Tags : Bypass, Security, Xbox, 360