One of the Google engineers who hacked the PlayStation Portal to run emulated PSP games has said Sony has now fixed the exploit after his team "responsibly reported the issues to PlayStation."
In February, Andy Nguyen, who works at Google on cloud vulnerability research, and Calle Svensson, a security engineer at Google, took to social media to show a PlayStation Portal running PSP game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories natively.
Sony released the PlayStation Portal as a handheld game streaming device that wirelessly connects to the PlayStation 5. Officially, it is not possible to play games natively on the PlayStation Portal. But Nguyen and co hacked the PlayStation Portal to run the PPSSPP emulator, which meant no Wi-Fi streaming was required.
At the time, Nguyen said the hack was “all software based”, which meant hardware exploitation was not required — but the team had no plans to release the hack.
Now, Nguyen has tweeted to say the bugs were fixed with the recently released 2.06 update after “we responsibly reported the issues to PlayStation.”
We responsibly reported the issues to PlayStation. Bugs are fixed on 2.06. https://t.co/0B38HRaaaw
— Andy Nguyen (@theflow0) April 2, 2024
It’s fair to say there has been some backlash to the revelation that the team disclosed the exploit to Sony, something Nguyen has expressed bemusement at. “No idea why you folks cry about the disclosure,” Nguyen said in a follow-up tweet. “If we just released to the public, do you think Sony would just leave it unpatched? Reporting vs. not reporting is only a few weeks of difference.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
