Researchers at local security vendor Symantec have warned that a Trojan virus has been let loose on Sony's immensely popular games console, the PlayStation Portable. If the virus succeeds in attacking the device, it turns it into a 'brick.'
This Trojan can render an upgrade that makes the PSP tougher to hack useless and deletes key files making the device nothing better than a brick. Symantec researchers have called this the Trojan.PSPBrick. "Once a user installs that Trojan, it deletes four critical files from the machine and a message comes up that says, 'Your PSP 2.0 is hacked, please reboot,'" said Dean Turner, senior manager with Symantec's Security Response team.
He added that the Trojan acts as software that can add different games to the device, but actually disables all protective mechanisms on the PSP. Symantec has rated the attack a Category 1 threat and said that although the Trojan does nothing other than rendering a person's device useless, it is in circulation although no widespread use has been reported. Eric Chien, the principal software engineer at Symantec Security Response confirmed the rating, "Basically the (PSP) is completely inoperable, and you've lost your device. It's called 'bricking.'"
He added that Trojan could not spread quickly since PSP users rarely want to modify their devices. "The types of people who would be affected wouldn't be everyone who has gotten the PSP," he explained. "It would be affecting the people who are trying to 'mod,' or update, their devices."
By all reports, this Trojan is apparently harmless, but it does drive home the fact that virus writes are looking beyond the Internet and the PCs, a fact that Turner acknowledged, "Attackers are going to start looking at gaming platforms because more and more of these devices are becoming interconnected," he said. "It's an evolution that we think has been coming for some time. The sky isn't falling, but it's certainly a natural evolution."
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