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[Borys]

Thanks, EvilAvatar:

The hacking community has been very busy this weekend. Accomplishments include:

1. Successfully ripping Hexic off of a kiosk disc and executing it in a PC browser (it runs very slowly)
2. Successfully modifying Hexic and running it on an Xbox 360 connected to Xbox Live
3. Hacking Hexic to earn several of the achievements without doing any of the work
4. Successfully running simple Flash applications that were never on the Xbox 360 (such as a clock application)
5. Modifying certain aspects of the King Kong kiosk demo to create the simple program pictured here

Speculation:

* Could this third item be behind the reset of the Xbox Live leaderboards? We hear people were earning some sick scores in Hexic before the reset (according to a blog post by Xbox Live's Larry Hyrb, the reset is a technical glitch having nothing to do with security issues.)
* These findings might make it possible to run a flash-based browser, flash-based media players, or even other flash games not available on Xbox Live Arcade
* There are many avenues of research that the hacking community is exploring. Given the history of past efforts by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft to prevent modification (all to no avail), it seems inevitable that one or more of these seeds of opportunity will yield fruit
* How far away are we from a gamer points reset, given that some gamers have been able to cheat to obtain them?
* Will it become possible to cheat at other games? That's the surest way to sap the enjoyment from any game, as Halo players on Xbox Live who have been the victims of cheaters can attest.

[Update1: linked to statement from Microsoft's Larry Hyrb regarding the leaderboard reset.]

Looks like the Live! hax0rs will have a field day with Halo 3!

Sorry if old

 

[Bodom78]

Trust the hackers to ruin the fun. Hopefully MS has alot more power with updating the dashboard so they can patch any of these inconveniences. For the time being, what do I care, we dont even have the 360 here in Aus yet :/

 

[DaCocoBrova]

Hey now! Don't get me excited.

 

[Jerkface]

Hexic is a basic Flash file which can be decompiled, edited and recompiled.

Unless Halo 3 is released as a Flash game on a disc signed with open flags then I don't think this is really relevant.

 

[Deleted member 1235]

er. yeah. because modders were able to run trainers over Xbox live in the past? Oh, wait, they got their asses banned.

pffft.... Halo 2 was broken for a ridiculously long time with cheaters being an every second game occurance when I quit. Not sure of the timeframe but it felt like about a half year.

 

[ZombieSupaStar]

go haxers go!



steal all their funs away! and then taste their tears! *gasm*

 

[Deleted member 1235]

That was from people taking advantage of glitches that were already present in the game and the online code. Because people, on the whole, are asshats. had nothing to do with modded Xboxes. you couldn't even take a modded xbox safely online even with your chip disabled, in certain circumstances, if you had a larger harddrive in place. LiVE made sure of that.

yeah people really are dicks. the larger hard drive was no problem until they started scanning both hard drive and eeprom as a combo (instead of just eeprom) so if you had a unmodded box and then took it online, your eeprom and HDD would be recorded as a pair, then if you modded it, it would see that your HDD was different and ban both the eeprom and the HDD serial. (from memory).

So as long as you take an xbox-live virgin xbox, mod it with a larger hard drive and a switch AND THEN take it online as long as the switch is always off, you don't get banned. (Unless they have fixed that as well now)

 

[Dave Long]

The potential damage to the entire Xbox Live experience from people hacking games and cheating to get higher scores is enormous. One of the most exciting developments of the system is the score ranking within any game. If that gets hacked, a lot of the excitement of Live is completely lost.

 

[bitwise]

MS has shown they can keep LIVE secure in the past. See no reason thats gonna change.

 

[LakeEarth]

What other flash-based Arcade Games are there? Zuma and Bejeweled?

 

[123rl]

The potential damage to the entire Xbox Live experience from people hacking games and cheating to get higher scores is enormous. One of the most exciting developments of the system is the score ranking within any game. If that gets hacked, a lot of the excitement of Live is completely lost.

So they'll fix that...by resetting the scores whenever someone cheats? I agree that something needs to be done to stop it. But that shouldn't take priority over the majority who just want to compare scores with their friends. I don't care if I'm, for example, 140th on the leaderboard for Hexic Marathon. What I care about is if I'm in 1st or 2nd place on my Friends list for that game

 

[The Faceless Master]

yeah, because nobody ever played bootleg games on LIVE on the original xbox...

nope, never happened... what?

and nobody played that bootleg Halo 2 on LIVE 3 weeks early...

then again, i guess if none of that happened, nobody got banned because they went and played halo 2 early, essentially tipping off microsoft...

it never happened...

 

[Friend]

yeah, because nobody ever played bootleg games on LIVE on the original xbox...

nope, never happened... what?

and nobody played that bootleg Halo 2 on LIVE 3 weeks early...

then again, i guess if none of that happened, nobody got banned because they went and played halo 2 early, essentially tipping off microsoft...

it never happened...

It never did happen. People were playing halo 2 early on xbox connect.

 

[Blaster1X]

The potential damage to the entire Xbox Live experience from people hacking games and cheating to get higher scores is enormous. One of the most exciting developments of the system is the score ranking within any game. If that gets hacked, a lot of the excitement of Live is completely lost.

Hackers managed to get their hands on the iso, the self-bootable demodisk that was released a few days ago, which was was dumped on a regular xbox running a modified version of one of the open source, publicly available disc dumper util , but tweaked at different offsets.

Those clowns took the demo disc iso, opened it up, browse around, found the flash file for Hexic, and mess around with it with regular pc tools, recompiled a new image, then when online with it.

That is all... it was never hacked! .... to the disappointment of a lot of people :lol

BTW. the leader-boards have been fixed.. www.majornelson.com

Xbox Live Leader boards & Stats
Posted: January 1, 2006 @ 2:01 pm (7 hours, 18 minutes ago) By: Major Nelson
We are currently experiencing an issue with some of the leader boards and stats for Xbox 360 titles. We have identified the issue, and are working on resolving it over the next few hours. Until this issue is resolved, there will be some leader boards and stats issues….thanks for your patience as we work through this. Now would be a good time to work on the campaigns of some of those single player games you have

I’ll update this post when the issue is resolved.

Edit: What happend was not a result of a hack (or hacks) or anything else security related. This is a bug, plain and simple.

Today

Originally Posted by MajorNelson.com
Edit: The issue is now fixed, and stats have been restored, with the exception of Geometry Wars:Evolved. The team continues to work on that title’s leaderboards.

 

[Last Hope]

This is nothing big. The Xbox lets you gain achievements while you are offline and then it uploads them while you are back online. I am sure files can be hexedited to show that you have unrealistic scores and achievements. If you had to be connected in order for them to be legit, then that might keep the score boards a little more legit. They may start doing this soon if this gets to be a problem. On the original, you had to be connected for scores to be uploaded.

 

[Blaster1X]

This is nothing big. The Xbox lets you gain achievements while you are offline and then it uploads them while you are back online. I am sure files can be hexedited to show that you have unrealistic scores and achievements. If you had to be connected in order for them to be legit, then that might keep the score boards a little more legit. They may start doing this soon if this gets to be a problem.

yeah, I expect a lot of new things this year to help combat cheating.

 

[The Faceless Master]

It never did happen. People were playing halo 2 early on xbox connect.

yep, people were playing on xbc and xlink... what i said never happened... ever... at all...

 

[fart]

flash is pretty secure. a cool trick, but nothing to get too excited about. wake me up when someone gets anywhere near an arb. code exp