It’s a day that Sony and all executives overseeing the PlayStation brand had dreaded, but it seems that the PS5 has been broken wide open. Naturally, it’s being used to bring back P.T. at first but nefarious deeds could soon follow as the internet clamors to work out just how famed Soulsborne sleuth Lance McDonald has managed to do it, and details of an exploit found in the PS5’s latest firmware, version 4.03 have been revealed.
While we’ll never condone the cracking open of your console, it’s certainly fascinating to see how McDonald, who published a video of what he did was able to so simply slide by the console’s internal barriers to access all the juicy inner workings that make tech enthusiasts celebrate. First, we see McDonald’s Cross Media Bar, unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with his work, filled with various Elden Ring Network Test builds. From here he accesses his settings screen, only to then access the User’s Guide section, but upon accessing it, this is where things get unusual for anyone unfamiliar with the prior back-end work that had clearly gone on.
A prompt appears on the screen to tell McDonald “The security of the page can’t be confirmed. The certificate provided by the server is invalid. Do you want to display the page?” Naturally, McDonald clicks yes, a loading circle appears before the word “Ready” and an OK prompt surface. When OK is pressed lines of internal prompts and code appear. and before you know it, McDonald is back on the XMB once more. What we now learn though is that the console debug menu has been activated because as he then returns to the settings screen and scrolls to the bottom, the ‘debug settings’ option is now present.
After showing players what can be found in the debug settings screen, McDonald then scrolls up to the ‘Game’ option, selects it, faces an error but pushes through regardless, to find ‘Package Installer’, and a .pkg file he’d clearly pre-prepared for this video. It’s here that the gig is up, the package file is installed, and the PlayStation prompt, the one that always appears in the top right corner when a game or some DLC has completed installing appears… “P.T. Ready to play” it reads. Yep, Lance McDonald has managed to get P.T. up and running on a clean PS5.
Obviously, the PlayStation community has been whipped up into a frenzy by the news, but you can only imagine the panicked state that now engineers and other leading personnel at PlayStation are now in. With 4.03 out there and resulting in vulnerable PlayStations for hacking as well as a myriad of other options, PlayStation will be very eager to issue a fix for this as promptly as they can. Perhaps we’ll get a response from PlayStation in the coming hours.
