Hackers Cause a Run on GripShift

Kris Erickson • Jan 4, 2009 • Comments ()

Gamestop employees were probably feeling perplexed all around the country this weekend as would-be hackers descended on their stores looking for copies of an old PSP game called GripShift. The auto-racing puzzle-platformer developed exclusively for the PSP won acclaim for its creative mash-up of different genres, but never sold in large quantities. Now, a hacker by the name of MaTiAz has discovered that the game can be exploited to potentially hack the PSP 3000.

Some readers will remember that software exploits such as the one contained in Liberty City Stories helped hackers crack the original PSP 1000 before the creation of the Pandora Battery. Copies of GTA sold for ridiculously high amounts on ebay until alternative methods of hacking the console were discovered.

The way that the exploit works is by causing the game to crash through a hacked save file. By causing such a "buffer overflow", hackers can potentially access parts of the PSP kernal memory and do things like dump copies of encrypted firmware to memory stick. This in turn opens up the possiblity of reverse-engineering the system to run unauthorized programs.

Below, you will find a video of MaTiAz demonstrating the exploit at work. Right now there isn't much to see, but we imagine that somebody will get a "Hello World" or similar demonstration running soon.