The PS4 Has Been Jailbroken, And It Might Work On PS5 Too

A group of hackers have pulled off a proper kernel exploit in the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro, thereby permitting homebrew applications and pirated games to run smoothly on the hardware. So, today, these consoles are officially jailbroken and the cherry on the cake is that the hack might work for the PlayStation 5, too. 

SpecterDev, Znullptr, and ChendoChap are the minds behind "pOOBs4." That's what it is called. A rose by any other name. However, the trio are very thankful to Andy "TheFloW" Nguyen who had shared hacks for several earlier firmware versions of the consoles onto Github, allowing the team to exploit the present 9.00 version. While this isn't the first attempt to jailbreak the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro, it is hitting the headlines as previous exploits asked users to keep their consoles on firmware versions that had already been surpassed by subsequent updates. So, these would only work on a very small number of consoles.

Watch this utterly grotty PlayStation 4 and DualShock 4 get a super-satisfying clean from this pro!

Of course, the "pOOBs4" hack is available online, though you can check it out here:

It's compatible with the version 9.00 firmware which Sony rolled out in September and version 9.03 firmware only arrived at the start of December. Ergo, there's still a fair few people who probably haven't updated their PlayStation 4s and will be able to benefit from the exploits. This is awesome news for homebrew hacks like the 60 frames per second Bloodborne mod that just looks simply stunning. What this doesn't mean is that there'll be an influx of hackers to online games. Once jailbroken, the PlayStation's online capabilities will not work, so never you fear.

If you're paying attention, you'll know that the version 9.03 firmware is applicable to the PlayStation 5 too. Therefore, if you haven't downloaded and installed that onto your new-gen console, it's possible that the "pOOBs4" exploit will work here too. It's possible. The kernel is present on the PlayStation 5, but because the lead developer doesn't own a PlayStation 5, they aren't sure if it would be successful in practice.

Featured Image Credit: Aurélia Dubois via Unsplash, Hello I Am Nik via Unsplash

Topics: PlayStation, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5