PSP users are being urged to beware of a Trojan which, once executed, turns their games gizmo into little more than an expensive book weight. The (PlayStation Portable) PSP Brick Trojan poses as a utility that allows gamers to run homebrew apps or pirated games. The latest version 2.0 of the PSP firmware stops the execution of custom code on the device. But after the discovery of a buffer overflow in version 2.0 of the PSP firmware, a firmware downgrade to 1.50 became the "Holy Grail" of PSP homebrew development. Various firmware dowgrade tools sprung up. But one of the utilities has turned out to be a Trojan that renders the PSP unusable. The malware poses as software from the "PSP Team". In reality the code will remove important system files from the flash which makes the system unbootable or a brick, as gamers call it. Eric Chien of Symantec said it would be difficult to recover an infected device. Some gamers have been hit after downloading the malware from gaming forums and running it on their PSP. "The Trojan can't be executed by accident. PSP users will only get infected if they attempt to modify or patch their device with malicious code," he said. Source: The Register
They've only been out for how long and look how much stuff has happened with them alreay! I think SONY maybe should have done something more to prevent this stuff from happening!
I've seen the source code when its been decompiled. Not nice and only a couple of lines long. There was always this risk with homebrew software available. Surprising however that the firmware wasn't protected in the first place.
Which should prove a lesson, don't do homebrew for your PSP and only download updates from the official sony site.
