Back in the day, consoles were relatively easier to hack where hackers and modders found a way to load pirated games onto them, which undoubtedly caused a huge headache for companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. These days security is considerably tighter, but it seems that Nintendo might have just experienced a breach.
According to a report from ArsTechnica, it appears that hackers have found a way to hack the Nintendo Switch. While we have seen hacks on the Switch in the past, what makes this particular hack worrying for Nintendo is that the hackers claim that it is “unpatchable”, meaning that there might not nothing Nintendo can do to fix it, which ultimately could lead to gamers downloading and running pirated games on the console.
The hack in question is dubbed “Fusée Gelée” (“Frozen Rocket”) and what it does is that it exploits buggy code found in NVIDIA’s Tegra X1’s USB recovery mode. This would bypass software that protects the bootROM, which like we said could in theory allow hackers to run code on the console, which like we said could lead to pirated games being run on it.
So why is this “unpatchable”? This is because the Tegra X1 bootROM on the Switch has been hardcoded into it and cannot be changed once it has left the factory. As ArsTechnica points out, Nintendo does have some options, one of which is detecting consoles that might have been hacked and locking them from online play. However the company has yet to respond to the hack so we’ll have to wait and see what they plan on doing.
Filed in . Read more about Hack, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Security and Social Hit.