10 Times Video Games Hackers GOT TOO CREATIVE

hacking a video game is not easy it requires a little bit of originality and ingenuity hi folks it's falcon and today on game ranks 10 times video game hackers got creative just a quick note before we get going we are laymen's here so keep that in mind we're gonna try to explain this stuff as best we can but we're not experts so it's gonna be kinda surface level if you happen to be a brilliant hacker and notice some flaw in what we're saying leave us a comment we want to hear from you we're just playing video games and having fun here so with that in mind starting off at number 10 hackers found a playstation 2 exploit in the dvd player to run freeware games like this took 20 years for hackers to discover and before this method most means of hacking the ps2 involved either modding a ps2 or using a pre-modded memory card or hard drive all you need for this one is a specially burned dvd which is about as cheap as it gets even though dvd burners aren't really as prevalent as they were in the mid 2000s as is the case with basically everything on this list though the actual process is kind of complicated and confusing to us non-programmers out there but we're trying to break it down as best and as simply as we can basically what happens is that a certain dvd function can be overloaded with malicious code keep in mind malicious is just a key word here but that code's used to trigger a buffer overflow which makes the ps2 try to read some different data and it can be easily modified through this method it's possible to get the ps2 to load dvds that aren't properly formatted for the ps2 so you can completely bypass any copy protection that the system has you can just load anything from homebrew games to games copied onto a dvd-r at this moment it only works on a very specific model of the ps2 but the hacker in question you figured out the exploit expects the method can be done on pretty much any version of the ps2 it'll just take a little bit more time to get it figured out it's impressive that there are people out there who are still looking for exploits on the ps2 which is obviously a long dead system but it also goes to show you just how massively popular the system was at number nine world of warcraft players discovered an exploit that lets level 1 players kill every player in npc in an entire area that this one is just massive it's nasty it's ridiculous uh it shouldn't have existed somehow back in 2012 some world of warcraft players figured out a way to access the kill commands not just for npcs but for every player in certain zones wow kind of has a history of ridiculous stuff like this happening at this point we've probably mentioned that corrupted blood but there was also that bizarre martin fury karate chop exploit just to name a few ridiculous game breaking stuff that happens in wow seems par for the course and while it only took blizzard about four hours to notice and put a stop to this bug that was four hours of people dropping like flies and even though dying and world of warcraft really isn't all that punishing it i mean that would be really annoying wouldn't it by the end of those four hours apparently the main cities of agramar and stormwind were just filled with the skeletons of the dead and the whole thing was kind of pretty eerie from the sounds of it the hackers that pulled this off didn't really go into great detail about how it all worked other than the fact that it worked in even if you were a level one player meaning that it was very easy for them to keep going with it even after getting banned regardless blizzard did end up fixing it which is good and it's something that hasn't happened again at least as far as we're aware so whatever the leak was they must have plugged it at number eight a hacker used the game cubic ninja to unlock the 3ds this is an absolutely incredible example the lengths that hackers will go to break into certain systems and the creative methods that they employ to do it whether you're against it or for it you at least have to respect this kind of hustle though certain methods already existed to get access to the 3ds they would usually cost the user money to do so like flash cards or hardware modding these things were possible but they were sometimes expensive solutions to this particular quote-unquote problem so instead of trying to gain access to the inner workings of the system through hardware or software alone a clever hacker instead exploited the qr code reading function employed by a specific and obscure game in order to dupe the 3ds into reading homebrew software that would be stored on an sd card yeah as long as you have the game it was at least at the time the easiest and cleanest way to install homebrew onto your 3ds the game itself cubic ninja which i've actually never even heard of myself had a vulnerability in its level creation sharing tool which allowed players to share levels by sharing qr codes you would generate a qr code and the data would transmit via that the hacker in question generated their own qr codes that would basically trick the system into thinking that anything installed to an sd card was 3ds compatible it's actually a pretty ingenious solution the only problem being that cubic ninja immediately shot up in price it went from being a totally forgotten game to one that is highly sought after and number seven players discovered a url exploit to generate thousands of dollars in xbox live points alright so you can argue whether some of the previous hacks or exploits on this list really hurt any companies or not but it's pretty safe to say that this particular point was at least somewhat damaging to microsoft even if it maybe wasn't quite as bad as it seemed at the time how all this worked comes down to microsoft points like we're not talking about real money here just the in-app currency that xbox used if you wanted to buy stuff on their system there was a special promotional offer running at a time around 2011 where they'd send you a link with a code and you use it to redeem two bucks and microsoft points some people quickly discovered an apparent flaw in this delivery method though instead of the urls being totally random strings they had certain values that if you change them anywhere between 0 0 0 zero and nine nine nine nine you could generate a new code that means there were thousands of possible codes that could be easily redeemed if you're willing to do it remember you could get two dollars for each code so it would be a pretty time consuming process but still free money if for whatever reason you'd think microsoft wouldn't notice of course they did notice and ended up banning people but we don't really know how they went about doing this maybe some people got away with it actually and number six a hacker figured out how to lower gta online load times and got rockstar to actually implement the changes here's a recent story that saw a hacker use their powers for a net positive especially if you play gta online and we're getting sick of the increasingly long loading times after messing around with the system files a bit that hacker discovered a kind of ridiculous flaw that was making the load times balloon like crazy in the game with a relatively minor change one dude was able to fix a problem that a billion dollar company was seemingly unable to do there's a pretty great write-up on how they managed to do all of it if you really want to get into the gritty details but basically the problem was in how the game loads duh the problem was a massive file labeled the net shop catalog which combined with the very inefficient way the game tried to load data i.e via a single bottlenecked string made the load times balloon to ridiculous sizes despite how relatively old the game is so yeah the load times being long is partially because of the full catalog of purchasable items just being huge and getting larger and larger all the time go figure microtransactions after identifying the problem the hacker was able to reduce the load times by a huge amount like literally 70 percent all the publicity over this led rockstar to fix the issue and they actually gave him a bug finder reward of like 11 000 which they normally only do for security exploits but this was such a major quality improvement for everyone playing the game it seems obvious that he should get some kind of reward and number five a hacker used an exploit to release a terrible game on steam this one's pretty funny if only because at least the hacker used the trick for a joke rather than say to spread a virus or something like that see back in 2016 a hacker was able to release a game on steam called watch paint dry which was literally a game that looks like it was probably made in rpg maker where you can do the titular watch paint dry it's obviously a joke but honestly it's not that far off from some of the garbage that gets released on steam every day what makes this one unique though is that the game was never actually approved by valve it's a game that got released on the steam store but totally bypassed all the official channels how the hacker did it of course is a little nebulous but basically they got access to the steamworks developer program which basically anyone can apply to join and then use some trickery to gain access to certain developer pages that normally they'd have to do some kind of a submission process to get access to basically they were able to trick the system into thinking that valve had approved the game even though it already had not the vulnerability was pretty quickly fixed after this little stunt but it ended up being a fairly harmless thing that's just kind of funny and to be frank we all owe a little gratitude to this guy on account if he hadn't done this somebody could have ostensibly done it who did want to upload a virus or some crap and number four making a crosshair on your screen for games like cs go to noscope i think this could be a good point for any form of cheating that doesn't involve changing the game somehow stuff that doesn't involve modifying the game files or anything like more diy stuff these days it's still fairly effective even after the developers intentionally made it so rifles are more inaccurate when fired from the hip it's not as good as it used to be but it still works and it's the sort of thing that can't be stopped with anti-cheat programs there are a lot of other more ridiculous methods people have gotten up to out there like getting blue filtering screens so they can see more clearly when underwater in certain games are using screen contrast altering programs to make games that don't let you affect darkness values way brighter probably the most annoying form of this cheating is when you watch someone stream to know exactly what they're doing it's basically looking at someone's screen and goldeneye for the modern day it sucked then it's actually worse now because at least back then they were in the same room as you so you could like punch them for it or at least yell at them stream sniping is something that can get you banned and because of the internet footprint makes it possible to prove but i have to assume that most people who cheat this way get away with it it's just too easy and too tempting for some people and about as far from clever as it gets but it does bypass the game's normal method of cheat detection in a powerfully annoying way at number three when the nintendo wii was hacked with a pair of tweezers this is a wild one that kind of makes my head spin when i think about it in the early days of wiimoting some hackers discovered a means to get access to the encryption key stored in a hardware chip inside the wii what they did was really standard but how they did it is just crazy see using a pair of tweezers they connected two different parts of the wii circuit board in order to move the data on the chip over to a section on the board that's easier to access this isn't a thing where they were able to pull it off with just one connection between two spots using a pair of tweezers it took multiple connections to get this thing to the place it needed to go slowly moving the info from its place of origin to a more vulnerable spot this polygon article describes it as pulling the key to the door of a locked room out from under the door itself and yeah i'm gonna say i agree now that the hackers had the key they could use the unlocked game discs on the system as well as possibly introduce homebrew elements as usual for these kinds of things more sophisticated solutions to hack the system came later but this is definitely one of the more impressive examples of ingenuity on this list and number two the nintendo switch was hacked with a paperclip here's a rather infamous example you probably already heard quite a bit about back in 2018 when the switch was still relatively new hackers discovered a way to get around the switch's copy protection with a simple paperclip how they did it was simple but also possibly dangerous for the system using a paperclip they shorted one of the pins on the right joy-con which allowed them to boot the system in a special recovery mode called rcm mode basically this mode makes the switches tiger x1 processor think there's been some kind of error with the regular boot so it starts up in the recovery environment instead from here the switches is basically a regular computer that can be modified as much as you want but the danger lies in the fact that even though it is fairly safe you are shorting a pin on your system which if done correctly is possibly going to totally fry the thing these days there are methods for doing this that are a lot safer than jamming a paperclip into your switch controller port but we won't be showing any of that for obvious reasons because this method is entirely hardware based on some level it can't be fully fixed making it one of the most effective and clever hacks we've ever seen and finally at number one using a ballpoint pen to bypass copy protection on the ps1 this one is probably the granddaddy of all console hacks if you were a kid in the late 90s there's a good chance you heard someone talk about this or possibly even tried it yourself the trick is kind of ridiculous how simple it is see for the ps1 sony printed the special security code on all of their disks that would be checked by the ps1 at startup meaning you couldn't just insert a printed cd and get it to play on the system it was actually really easy to copy a playstation disk back then if you had a cd burner on your computer you could make a copy and there was nothing preventing a pc from reading all the content on the disk so really you can make copies to your heart's content the trouble is actually getting the ps1 to read the discs well actually that proved to be pretty easy if a little awkward all you had to do was prop up the ps1 lid with a pen to trick it into thinking that it was closed then put an actual ps1 disk to get by the copy protection and then quickly swap disks meaning literally yanking the ps1 disk out and inserting the bootleg disk quickly in its place if done correctly the bootleg will work because the copy protection is only checked once which is when the game starts which was very easy to exploit all it took was a pen help some people were able to get it worked with a spring and some quick reflexes and you'd be able to play basically anything it's not exactly elegant in practice but it worked and it worked really well what do you think leave us a comment let us know if you like this video click like if you're not subscribed now's a great time to do so we upload brand new videos every day of the week best way to see them first is a corset subscription so click subscribe don't forget to enable all notifications and we thank you very much for watching this video i'm falcon you can follow me on twitter falconhero we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 800,369

Rating: 4.9345269 out of 5

Keywords: video game hackers, video game culture, gamer hackers, pc game hackers, playstation hackers, gta online, grand theft auto, xbox live, playstation 2, steam hackers, gameranx, falcon, creative gamers, console hacks, fps game hacks

Id: CG3UxDsmp0w

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021