About a month ago we reported that hackers had confirmed Sony’s worst nightmare and found a way inside the newly released Vita. Sony quickly responded by taking the exploitable file, Motorstorm: Arctic Edge, off the PSN permanently. They did this but not before several thousand people were able to hack their Vita to run homebrew games and ports like Doom:
A new exploit was just discovered in a new game. This time “Everybody’s Tennis” a title that is available on the European and Asian PSN, and followed it up with a blog post on their official Wololo.net blog:
“Dear Sony, it has come to my attention that one of the PSP games available on the playstation Vita has a vulnerability that could lead to the execution of external code by some malicious users. Therefore I am writing this blog post so that you can patch the game or remove it from the PSN store as soon as possible. Preferably, I suggest you take the money from your clients first, and prevent them from downloading the game afterwards, just like you did with Motorstorm Arctic Edge, 3 weeks ago. This way it will be a win-win situation for you, and you can always blame it on the hackers later on.
As a matter of fact, I have discovered that some “hackers” (I prefer to call them terrorists) have already prepared a tool wich, using this vulnerability, could allow people to run software that would be extremely dangerous for your business, such as 20 year-old 8 bit games and 154 different versions of pong.
I think this puts your business at risk, and I’ve tried to stop those vilains by all means necessary, but sadly it seems they are not breaking any law. Hopefully, giving you the name of the game will help you to take some efficient action. Those people are clearly wrong in their mind to try to play crappy open source software, when they could enjoy a great game such as Ridge Racer for less than 10$ a track, (which is clearly not a ripoff compared to the price one would have to pay in the real world to drive cars that completely defy the laws of physics. Although on that subject I woud like if you could help me, as my version of the game seems to be blocked in “demo mode” for some reason. All the 5 cars have exactly the same specs, so surely there’s something I’ve done wrong somewhere.)
I digress. The name of the game is Everybody’s Tennis. It is also known as Minna no tennis in Japan. Thankfully the game is not available on the US Vita store, so this should limit the problems on your end. I heard however that these hackers have prepared a US version of the hack just in case that version is being sold somewhere such as the HK store. I also heard people can buy the UK version from the US if they buy some PSN cards from resellers on ebay and other sites. If I may give some advice, I think this is not secure enough. True, you did a good job in preventing people from buying games outside of the country they live in (and being a French living in Japan, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that I can’t buy any game on the French PSN, this is exactly how globalization should work, and it helps me sparing lots of money by not buying any game), but I think in order to avoid future hacks, you should simply prevent everyone from buying games on the PSN, which will guarantee you a complete control of the market.”
Toying with Sony is something of a joy for these people, obviously. In response, Sony has already taken down the game but has not given details about how it would go about replacing the game if a user who already bought it wanted to re-
