Gaming XBox: Hacked and Ripped Open

[Red]

[b]It seems that the gaming world has found XBoxs' fatal flaw, hackers.

A number of teenage hackers in America have managed to do things such as prevent an XBox from loading properly, and play pirate games and music.

They have also enabled it to play N64 and Playstation games, simply by some minor hacking into the OS. One kid has claimed to have different OS systems running on an XBox.

Could this spell the downfall of XBox's online service? Personally, I think that if after barely a year onto the market the XBox has been hacked into, it could spell the end, or many expensive patch releases..[/b]

[Semjaza]

The Xbox has been hacked for months now. Mod chips are now in heavy supply, and VERY easy to get. There are emulators for SNES, Atari, N64, Colecovision, NES, Genesis and MAME right now... As well as Media Player. Last I heard, PSX hasn't been done properly yet. There is a big difference between claims, and things that were or can be done. If I believed everything I saw, I would already think GC was hacked... There was a video of kids playing burned GC games a while back.

I remember DC being hacked far more quickly than Xbox was. Every system will be hacked eventually (although GC seems like it would be the most difficult and expensive to), and ones based on some sort of Windows technology will most likely be hacked the fastest since a lot of people know their way around it (DC used Windows CE and Xbox uses a modified Windows 2000 kernel).

As for Live... I don't really know how it's going to work. I was under the impression that you wouldn't be able to just surf the internet freely. You'd be basically locked inside MS's area. Meaning everything would be protected by them the best they could.

I don't see how the system being hacked to play backups will lead to some need for patches honestly. There will probably be a lot of registering for Xbox Live games (like PSO and it's serial code, and most online PC games) to reduce the problem of people playing burned games. Either way you'd have to pay for Live anyway.

And like I said, Live will be regulated by MS. I don't see how people could ever just send you a virus or something else. Perhaps they could cheat in games somehow, but Gamesharks allow this anyway.

[RicoTranzrig]

I've ripped into an X-Box before, took a look inside...and the design is just like an actual PC...with EIDE cable, socket 375 or P3/4 socket, even the power cable connection to the motherboard is identical. With a brief modification to the core instructions, anyone with a technical background could easily modify it to function like a normal computer...running emu's and stuff like that.

[No-Name]

yup...modchip...the gift from heaven. erm...i mean hell....right *walks off to hold PS2"

[Red]

[b]The DC was really the first console to run an OS, so I'm not surprised that it was hacked faster, but one of the XBoxs' big points is it's online functions, since broadband will be the only option available, (this is in the UK, I'm not sure if there's narrowband available in the US) it makes it far easier to hack into.[/b]

[Semjaza]

I'm not sure of your reasoning behind why it would be any easier to hack.

Regardless, modded Xboxes can NOT use Xbox Live. It simply won't work. MS is going to be checking on the server side, so any new mod chips that come out will be blocked as well.

[vegeta rocker]

i think anything electrical can be hacked, so i doubt it spells serious trouble for x box. It could be the same for pc's, oh my gosh! They hacked into a computer! Microsoft is done!

[Red]

[b]I don't know if people are incapable of using Live if they have the XBox modded, but I'm sure they'll find a way. If hackers have got so far that they can play Zelda 64 on an XBox...[/b]

[Semjaza]

There are mods that have on and off switches so they can get past Xbox Live. BUT it must be set to off in order to get on, at least that's what the talk is as of now. I'm not so sure if it's true, but people make it sound likely.

And even if they did? They could play copied games. How would this affect anything else? It doesn't suddenly mean they could send viruses or do player kills in games that don't support them (I'm sure Gameshark will do this anyway).

Just because a console can support emulation, that doesn't mean jack for this kind of stuff. People could play NES games (although poorly) on copied CDs on the PSX. Didn't hurt anything. The same with DC. It was hacked, and could go online (via broadband in some cases as well)... but it didn't hurt the online functions at all.

People can play Zelda 64 on a PC, why not on an Xbox? They are practically the same as it is.

Edit: From Cnet...

"A Microsoft representative said Xbox Live would not include specific diagnostics to detect mod chips but would employ "military-grade security" to prevent hacking and other threats. The representative declined to specify any action Microsoft was taking against mod chip makers but said the company would vigorously protect its intellectual property."

So apparently mods could be allowed, but they will be watching regardless. Either way, mods affect your system... Not other people's. Xbox Live is going to have heavy security.

[Letterman]

I have to put in here, you have made so many mistakes, the first problem that you have is that for some reason you think that the usa is the best at hacking consoles, i'm sorry to tell you but upto the advent of the playstation all the hacks came from the far east, since then all the best hacking was done in europe (neo, messiah, neox, extender, executer, enigmah, exodus, origachip & and neo3 (not to be confused with the neo series for the ps2)

for what its worth xbox live works just fine with a modded xbox, but you should only use the chip to play imported games or backups of games you already own, if you use them for copied games you are hurting the software companies and costeng everyone else more money.

I guess the main reason that europe leads the way with chips is because we get our games much later so we have more need to be able to play imports and yes even your gameshark is actualy made in europe by datel, interact just badge it as an american product.

of course to play an xbox live game you must own the original in order to have a valid key so copying would be useless

Letterman

[Semjaza]

No one even mentioned who was best at modding anything. I think most people know that eastern countries lead thiss frontin general, mostly because there is more demand there like you said. I still fail to see what this has to do with anything that was said.

And like I edited in my post, things with the mod chipped Xbox changed. It was widely believed for a while that MS would block out modded systems, and theoretically they still can. I don't doubt they will at some point either. Either way, I edited my post wit that info months ago.

MS has been targeting mod selling sites rather heavily lately (although Nintendo and Sony are also involved, seemingly to a lesser extent). It would be in MS's best interest to block it all out, even if they deny their doing it right now. Blocking mod chips was a very persistant rumor back when I posted that lol.

[Guest mk73mhz]

I got my xbox modchip already installed its an executer hehe I changed my harddrive to a 20 gb seagate instead of that western digital 8 gb harddrive hehe now i can just copy the games to my harddrive and play them plus i installed an evolution x os to boot up those emulators and roms hehe and of course so that i can play divx and multi region dvd's... as for xbox live well i dont live in the us so i dont really care if i dont get to play there hehe

[RicoTranzrig]

[COLOR=darkblue]Well, since you bought your X-box, you can do whatever you want with in private. The security is obviously there to ensure a good time for players on X-box: Live. They paid for it legit, they should get their money's worth as opposed to people who try to play on Live for free or decide to cheat other players out. I think it is a smart move not to target mod chip makers directly, but prevent modded X-box's from participating in the online world if an anomaly is being broadcasted as a result of the modification.[/COLOR]

[Semjaza]

This is what I don't get... Hacking a game (like PSO on DC), is not the same as modding a system. Yes you can play backups and whatever else... But since when do mods allow you to bypass security or mess with actual gameplay? I've never seen any that do this.

Live is all server side for the most part. No modchip is going to trick MS into thinking you subscribe to Live. No modchip is going to act like a Gameshark and hack online games (why not just buy a Gameshark in that case?). I understand the other points here, but I really fail to see what a modchip can do to affect Live other than letting people play bootlegged copies they shouldn't be playing.

[Guest cloricus]

Ha... Semjaza, your still thinking of the Xbox as a platform, not what it really is, a cheaply made computer. ALL computers can be hacked.
Your best bet for live is to wait for the Xbox Linux OS version, there are holes in MS Server and someone will use those to create the accounts and then access them.
Also if what you say is true, that you have to pay to use live then you are very naive to think they will not let illegal versions and MOD chips on. (Maybe not so on the illegal version but on mod chips yeah.)
Reason, these people have illegal versions and MS makes nothing from illegal versions but if they pay to use live MS gets some thing back.

Well live was the reason I was going to buy an Xbox and get legit games (infact in a weeks time) but if I have to pay to use it I might put it off for a while and just see what the real costs are.

-Lord Epssy

[Semjaza]

I'm not saying the system cannot be hacked. I'm starting to get the idea that no one here really has gotten my points.

MS is using military grade security on its Live Servers. If anyone thinks that any sort of false Live accounts can be made even remotely easily, they are insane. I know of very few people with falsified accounts on even plain old MMORPGs on PCs, and theoretically that should be a hundred times easier to do - and even then, a lot of these accounts are found and cancelled. Same with dorks who figure out a hacked password to some porn site... Even the low quality ones can find out if someone is cheating them.

I don't see how things MS [i]itself[/i] has said, that I am basically saying back to anyone here makes me "naive." MS has SAID these things, so have people involved... and like I said Unreal Championship supposedly can even block out those said mod chips. This according to what MS' people have told others who were invited to Live bootcamps or are involved in some other way. Sure they could update the chips in their Xboxes, but modding Xboxes is not cheap or easy (a lot of the mods need like 2 dozen soldering points), and even then all MS has do to is mess with their server and block out yet another one.

Satellite companies and cable companies do this as well. They might not be able to always tell the direct souce, but they can send something through to pirate boxes that will basically nulify them, forcing people to fix or upgrade their units. How anyone can think this is not possible on Live is beyond me. For MS to spend all this time on something like this, and NOT be able to tell such simple things when any supposed hacker can... That's ridiculous.

And I'm not quite getting your point on this money issue. You think MS is okay with people playing copies as long as they pay for Live? That's utter crap lol. MS has already gone after mod chips in Australia, and forced a lot of online retailers to totally stop carrying these chips as well. It's in their best interest to sell these gamse, and a whole $50 fee (most of which will probably go to keeping the servers up) will mean next to nothing.

Game companies make money off games. Not hardware, and I'm sure based on this business model... little profit will be made off Live for a long whilte either. This is the whole point of licensing games in the first place. Companies [i]need[/i] that money, and how anyone can say MS will just forget about copies, modders and hackers makes no sense to me.

The whole point I was making before is that simple hacking of a system does NOT have anything to do with Live. Just because someone has a mod chip and can play burned copies of a game, does not mean they can suddenly just do whatever the hell they want on Live.

Hacking of a system, tricking a server into sending code to some other device (this was what was done with DC and GC PSO games) or breaking into a server somehow are totally different things than sticking a mod chip in your system.

Some Xbox chips can be turned off however, which would be the only true way to bypass supposed Live securities. And if you still don't believe me go to this link [url]http://xbox-scene.fxp.info/index.php?act=ST&f=21&t=13089[/url]
and read the first post. They'd know more than anyone considering they are all involved in the mod scene in the first place.

[Guest cloricus]

Semjaza, ANY SYSTEM CAN BE HACKED. It just takes time, some times one minute, some times a hundred years, but every thing made by a human can be hacked.

They said that 128 (or was it 64bit?) could not be hacked/decoded, it took a few thousand people about four years to decode one sentence, but after they had done that any thing in it could be hacked.

Miliary grade means nothing, it really doesn't. All it means is they payed a larger group of people allot more money than any one else would to create a server system to hold and distribute data to appropriate terminals with out redundancy.

2k server had holes, lots of them. If MS runs live on them it will be hacked within a year. (I am unsure of what live is running, if any one knows its specs post them please.)

As for Mods, Semjaza, you sound like you have only read one or two articles on them and I'm just guessing that you have no real idea on how they run/work apart from the basics you have read?

Any way the one lesson here, if Live is good people will pay for it, if it is crap it will die or be hacked.

-Epssy

[Semjaza]

[QUOTE][b]
Also if what you say is true, that you have to pay to use live then you are very naive to think they will not let illegal versions and MOD chips on. (Maybe not so on the illegal version but on mod chips yeah.)
Reason, these people have illegal versions and MS makes nothing from illegal versions but if they pay to use live MS gets some thing back.
[/B][/QUOTE]

First of all, this is what I was addressing, and how I am naive to think other wise... When MS is actually doing what you said they wouldn't be. To make it seem as if MS simply doesn't care because they are getting a entire 50 dollars a year off of this? That makes it okay for them not to get any profit off the games at all? You skipped over that entire aspect of my argument, which was the basis of most of it and what all I wrote was addressing in the first place. Money.

On top of that my first sentence says that I know any system can be hacked... Yet no one had really given one good reason why adding a modchip to a damn Xbox means that Live suddenly is overrun with hacked and cheated games. May I please have an example of that? That is not how it works. People have to do a hell of a lot more than just that.

I'm sure people will find a way to bypass MS's securities... But there is nothing stopping them from making more securities, just like I said. MS is losing so much money on Xbox that I doubt they'll sit idley by as every idiot tries to play games for free. DC wasn't anything special, and other than people hacking PSO files (and I already mentioned how they did that in the last post), no one was tricking the Sega servers into letting them play pay games for free. Most people can't even figure out how to get Juno to work on the thing, and that's not even hard.

And since I know nothing about mod chips (I mentioned them in one simple paragraph in my last post, so who knows how you came to this conclusion -- there was no reason to say more than what was said), please educate me in the millions of ways people are using them right now to hack every last aspect of the Xbox that would lead them to be able to play Live for free. Even if they could suddenly play copies online (which they cannot right now, and it's not likely MS will never update to lock out other mod chips), that has little to do with "hacking" Live, as it is within your own console. Like I said, simple hacking of a single console is completely different than what some people are suggesting. There is also a WAY bigger PC hacking community than console one... Most people in the console community don't actually do anything, they just copy the few people that do. Sure, the developers of the chips would have to figure out how to bypass a few things, but the average enduser wouldn't know what the hell they were.

Linux has little to do with it either... Yeah, someone can run Linux on an Xbox. They've been doing it for a while. That certian Xbox running Linux has [i]nothing[/i] to do with MS''s core servers though. What would waiting for a way to run Live on that do? Especially considering that Xbox games cannot even be run within the Linux environment to this point.

What you are suggesting now doesn't even exist for the system. There isn't a mod chip that is completely unknown to MS obviously. There are no "stealth" ones such as there were available on other systems... and if there were, they don't work right now considering MS can detect them so easily. And like before, if someone does make another mod chip... It won't take MS long to find out thanks to the countless sites on the subject (at the very least), and suddenly they can block that one as well. Hell, people still haven't made a PS2 mod that doesn't require disc swappingwithin a dew second time frame.

Considering they are banning entire serial numbers with this... It's going to take people a hell of a lot more money and patience than is worth it. That's what it comes down to.... Of course it can be done eventually, but why the hell does it matter if it's going to take past the life of the console?

You might know more about computer aspects, but you cannot apply every single one of them to this. It may be a computer in a console box, but the actual business model is based on the same aspects as all the other consoles... And that's licensing. Allowing mods and copies kills all that profit off, and the cost is going straight to MS. I'm sure MS doens't really give a crap how their stuff effects other companies in a bad way in most of the PC world, they sold it already. This is their problem though.

You picked out certain things I said and jumped on them... Seems like you didn't read the context though, which is why there seems to be all these arguments against the smallest things I said and not the main ones. Doesn't matter, I have nothing else to say on the subject... No hard feelings either way :).

[James]

[color=#507AAC]Semjaza is correct in his conclusions about Xbox Live.

This reminds me of the N64 pirating. Remember a machine called Dr. V64? You had to buy the hardware...and then burn a cartridge game onto a CD. Of course, you always had to use the Dr. V64 to actually play the game.

Of course, that's not the same as what you're talking about here. But think about it; Nintendo's own security for piracy was very tight (due to the proprietary nature of th software). But moreover, the entire process of copying/pirating was both too expensive and too time consuming.

In the case of Xbox Live, you must remember that this is not a static service. If they system is ever hacked, MS will discover the hack and take steps to eradicate the problem. So, sure...you may have a cheater now and then. But the cheater would be reported and blocked. Really, it's simple.

It's not so much a case of getting into the hardware or the network. That stuff is really irrelevant. It's a matter of checks and balances...how Microsoft can protect the integrity of the game environment. And given the combination of security on all levels as well as the dynamic nature of a persistent online network...I think that people are blowing a lot of hot air about nothing. I seriously don't believe that we will see rampant cheating and misuse of Xbox Live. It just won't happen.[/color]

[Guest cloricus]

[color=teal]$50!!! (Is that AU?)

Okay sorry there goes my argument, I thought they would be charging allot to use it.
Eg. Per use, which is m$'s new way of taking over the net/world btw.
(Not new, Bill Gates wrote about it eight or so years ago.)

You are both repeating what I said in my last post
-"Any way the one lesson here, if Live is good people will pay for it, if it is crap it will die or be hacked."-


As for not getting hacked think of this example, on our school network (Xp pro, and novell servers) they locked down every thing, basically corporate type security. (And don?t think, ?Oh it?s just a school network, nothing to hard there?)
With in a term we have full access to most things that we want, the one we can?t get is the net. We are working on that, we have some access to it now? *kick?s superscout?*
But this is just a bunch of kids every class they get at a computer alt-tabing every time a teacher came past, just finding holes in the systems that stop them doing what they want.
Now think of the groups of bored people just pecking at live looking for holes.

As for Static, D2 B.net is all I can say to that.

But for 50 bucks there is no point except a challenge I guess.


I know that this is incorrect...
-"Most people in the console community don't actually do anything, they just copy the few people that do."-
Not true, it is for PC, but not for consols.

And let me get this straight, the Xbox is a computer. You can't deny it.
(Lol it has better spec's than two of my pc's.)

I have said you will have to "wait" for that version of Linux.



But as always it comes back to why would you bother... I wouldn't, and I can't see any gamer saying it is bad price wise.

[/color]

[Semjaza]

Nah, it's $50 US. I'm not sure what that is Australian heh. Regardless, it's the cost of one game... and you get a headset and some startup discs with it lol.

As for that console hacking whatever thing I said that you quoted... I kind of meant in more in the way that very few people actually create mods and hack from scratch, compared to people who simply buy mods (a good deal of which do not install them themsevles). I guess most everything is like that though lol.

[James]

[color=#4E5DA2]As I mentioned to Semjaza, we must remember also that the Xbox Live network is totally closed and controlled by Microsoft. Even if you did somehow hack in, you'd be blocked pretty damn quickly. I don't think we're giving enough credit to the actual substance of the network itself.[/color]

[Guest cloricus]

Jame's the smartest thing that m$ could be doing is running Live on a terminal version of Linux... (And I wouldn't be surprised if they were.)

$100... for a year... hmm... I would have to think about that...
What does it use, like your existing broadband plan and takes any downloads and upload through that. And how much bandwidth does it take up.