James Delahunty
6 Oct 2005 21:33
Symantec Corp. has named the first ever trojan found in a gaming device, Trojan.PSPBrick. The PlayStation Portable malware has only been given a category 1 threat level because it could only possibly effect a device which it is run on by use of an exploit. There have se far been no reports of infections. The PSP Team Patcher has been around for a few days now, and when run it deletes vital files from the PSP's flash memory, breaking it.
"It does not affect the average user," said Eric Chien, a principle software engineer at Symantec. "This is the first time we have seen a Trojan on a gaming device." It disguises itself as a file to let users run their own code on a PSP. "It goes to show malicious code writers aren't just targeting personal computers and aren't just trying to get some replicating code to infect the machines," Chien said "Anything that can run code is potentially being targeted."
Symantec learned of the malware while monitoring chat rooms used by the gaming community. Users who are worried about the eboot.pbp files they run can use PSafeP v1.1, an application by Dark Killer that aims to combat malicious homebrew. Check it out on PSPUpdates.
Update 2005-10-20: Our user igounfaze informed us that Symantec's anti-virus software deletes the overflow.tif regardless of its contents. Even the "valid" ones that are used for downgrading PSP v2.0 to v1.50 are identified as malicious by the software. What's even more strange is that Symantec's software does not care about the two other files (h.bin and index.dat), and that the overflow.tif cannot be ignored or put in the exclusions list.
Source:
Reuters