The Microsoft Banhammer Comes Crashing Down on 360s

[Street_Kings]

Well, i've PMed a few members on this board with a warning not to download the last XBL patch, but if you downloaded the last update from XBL anyway, and have any modified firmware at all, you're now banned (or will soon be). Seems the last XBL update was placed to data farm, and serial numbers of modified systems were reaped. They began to drop the banhammer this morning, and the MS killcount continues to rack up.

Long story short, if you have a modded box, and didn't download the last update/patch, don't. If you did, you're screwed.

Disc-Jitter patches and firmwares failed, and seemingly were detected anyway 0.o

[myshtern]

Is that because it makes it easier to play pirated games?

[john]

Good for M$.

[nicklk]

All the gamer forums I am part of are saying its just an issue with Halo 3 thats not allowing them to sign in....

[nicklk]

OH snap!

http://www.thefloor.org/msftl.jpg

[nicklk]

from what I am reading they are crackin down thru the Halo 3 Beta, which is on the Crackdown game......Kinda funny that they CRACKED DOWN on us with Crackdown This shit was planned all along.

Good thing I dont have a modded 360 :whew:

[DrJones]

Good for M$.

I agree.

The people who think this is unfair or get pissed at M$ for doing this are just plain morons.

Microsoft should of put a little trigger in the hardware so that when this happens they could of sent a little message to irreversibly brick a console, not just strip it from Online play, but make it 100% useless.

[M@]

Haha, and I was wondering why Crackdown's graphics sucked compared to all the other 360 games. They were in a rush to put it out there for this very reason. Also explains why I've seen it crash 2 or 3 Xbox 360 consoles. Fucked up shit.

[M@]

I agree.

The people who think this is unfair or get pissed at M$ for doing this are just plain morons.

Microsoft should of put a little trigger in the hardware so that when this happens they could of sent a little message to irreversibly brick a console, not just strip it from Online play, but make it 100% useless.

Yeah, that wouldn't be a HUGE lawsuit or anything. Once you buy the Xbox, it's YOURS. It's private property. Xbox Live is a service, thus why they are allowed to do whatever they want with that. But if anyone wants to mod their Xbox, fuck it. It's their property, they can do what they want; as long as it's for personal use. Xbox Live wants nothing to do with them, which is fine. That's their call.. so that's exactly what they did.

In case you were wondering, no, my Xbox is not modded either. This is just the way I see it.

[nicklk]

Its not the modded XBOX thats getting you banned, its pirated copies of the games that you are playing......I've been reading on this all night last night and today and it seems that if you have a modded box, but a legit copy of the game most people haven't been getting banned.

And the system still works whether you have a modded box or pirated copies of the game, it just means you can't connect to XBOX live....in which the terms of conditions when you sign up for XBL is that you can't play pirated games.

[bluetalon]

What kind of "modding" can you do to an xbox? I never really understood that...

[nicklk]

Also, this is kind of a good ploy for M$....ban all these guys that have modded consoles (the serial number of the console is placed to M$ so that, that console can never be online again) will have to go and purchase a new console.....emphasizing a spill into the new Elites

[nicklk]

What kind of "modding" can you do to an xbox? I never really understood that...

You can mod the firmware and add hard drives so that you can rip a game onto the hard drive......which means you can rent a game from Blockbuster ($5) and rip the game on the hard drive and have that game forever. No load times, and infinite amount of games (dependant on your drive size) for cheap

[nicklk]

Something funny is that the Halo 3 beta was released onto the CD of Crackdown from the introduction of the game (the main reason why alot of people even bought this game, and if someone didnt want to buy it they just burnt a copy so that they could get the Halo 3 beta).....but was just released the day before yesterday. Someone mentioned that at the release, there were ~75,000 people on XBL playing the Beta, and by the time later last night there were only ~4,000 lol....its an excellent ploy by M$ to create a crackdown, intice all these nerds with the biggest game release in 3 years and use it to check for pirated games

[Nate]

I didn't know pirates even had XBOXes.

[DrJones]

Yeah, that wouldn't be a HUGE lawsuit or anything. Once you buy the Xbox, it's YOURS. It's private property. Xbox Live is a service, thus why they are allowed to do whatever they want with that. But if anyone wants to mod their Xbox, fuck it. It's their property, they can do what they want; as long as it's for personal use. Xbox Live wants nothing to do with them, which is fine. That's their call.. so that's exactly what they did.

In case you were wondering, no, my Xbox is not modded either. This is just the way I see it.

They aren't taking the Xbox from you, it's still yours. They are just limiting the functionality from being a next-gen video game console, to being a paper weight. You are still more than free to use it for that purpose.

I think that is 100% acceptable when people are modifying their product to steal. Should they not be able to protect the products they have created? They aren't forcing you to buy an xbox, it's your choice. If you choose to buy one you can play by their rules. If they say you can't modify it to steal games, than you can't modify it to steal games.

[M@]

I'm sure there's already someone out there working on a workaround for the banz0ring. Sure, your screen name/account is probably banned too, but that's nothing a different credit card can't fix.

[nicklk]

Your gamer tag isnt banned, its just the serial number of the box that you signed on with thats banned......

Which means, M$ is emphasizing you to buy a new console to access XBL

[ReggieRay]

So yeah when i was talking to you about Halo 2 the other day i forgot about the cheating. For the most part X-box live and halo2 have been like the old west its lawless out there. I welcome the ban hammer. They should have droped it years ago.

[M@]

They aren't taking the Xbox from you, it's still yours. They are just limiting the functionality from being a next-gen video game console, to being a paper weight. You are still more than free to use it for that purpose.

I think that is 100% acceptable when people are modifying their product to steal. Should they not be able to protect the products they have created? They aren't forcing you to buy an xbox, it's your choice. If you choose to buy one you can play by their rules. If they say you can't modify it to steal games, than you can't modify it to steal games.

I completely understand, but that's where you get into a gray area. I personally have a friend that had his 1g Xbox modded for use of MP3's, MPEG's, Etc. off of his personal computer, so he was using it as a gaming system, and storage unit. He never made illegal copies of games, never sold anything like that, never even bothered TRYING that kind of stuff. However, I do see what you're saying and that's a good perspective I suppose. I still think it's bullshit, though. If I OWN something and you want to completely disable it after I pay $500+ for it, because I wanted to modify it to play my MPEG files, etc. (I know 360's can now, but let's just go with this for argument's sake), you better believe I'd be one PISSED off customer among MANY.

[M@]

Your gamer tag isnt banned, its just the serial number of the box that you signed on with thats banned......

Which means, M$ is emphasizing you to buy a new console to access XBL

Okay, still... I wouldn't be surprised if sooner or later someone finds a workaround to it. Or a way to change the S/N in the machine's OS.

[Street_Kings]

They aren't taking the Xbox from you, it's still yours. They are just limiting the functionality from being a next-gen video game console, to being a paper weight. You are still more than free to use it for that purpose.

I think that is 100% acceptable when people are modifying their product to steal. Should they not be able to protect the products they have created? They aren't forcing you to buy an xbox, it's your choice. If you choose to buy one you can play by their rules. If they say you can't modify it to steal games, than you can't modify it to steal games.

Would be an interesting concept if the entire DRM world worked this way huh? How many pro-DRM captain righteousnesses on this board would have broken gear if every MP3 that you played blew up your mp3 players? Or CDs that you burned without owning every track on the CD first nuked your CD players? Or DVDs that you borrowed from friends without buying the title nuked your DVD player? Or computers that stopped playing videos for every piece of copyrighted material (this includes pr0n you downloaded, you tube videos of copyrighted material, even the SNL parodies and a billion things posted in the videos section of this site all the time) you didn't buy killed your video card's ability to play video? I would find it hard to believe nearly anyone on this site if they said they have never, ever clicked on a funny link of tv bloopers (property of their respective TV networks, thief.), pr0n (property of their respective studios, thief), or music (which the RIAA will soon be at your front door to eat your babies for, thief.)

Simply because you didn't mod your (electronics gadget here) personally to play this stolen material, doesn't mean someone up the line didn't bypass DRM somewhere (De-CSSing, CD->MP3 ripping, burning, etc) to get it to you.

I do agree that people saying it's unfair or wrong of M$ are idiots. It's like stealing cable and complaining when comcast cuts it off.

Personally, I torrent and try every game i'm considering buying. In the end, if I believe a piece of software is worth my money, I go out and buy it. I can honestly say every burned game I still own, I actually own the original. The crap games I didn't like get tossed. The fact that I did it in the reverse order (copy -> legit) violates DMCA, and oh well. I'll pass on the blockbuster/gamefly route due to the fact that every time I go to rent the game, everything I want is already checked out, and thanks to game pass it's gone for fucking months at a time.

On a side note, what I do find kind of funny is that this exploit has been in the wild over a year, and this is the first step they've taken to fix it. When hypervisor's exploit was found in october, allowing people to install linux and other unsigned code, they shit themselves and had a fix out in literally a month and a half, even though their box was wide open to piracy.

BTW, as a fix, i'd bet people will go the xbox1 route and simply swap out the motherboards eeprom which contains the box's SN. Since the rampant overheating problems of the first years 360's, it would be fairly cheap and easy to source dead 360's that you can scavenge one from.

[M@]

I've never downloaded anything illegaly.









:spit:

[nicklk]

I've never downloaded anything illegaly.


:spit:

I've got pirated copies of almost every program on my computer, but if Adobe were to send an update for an updated PS CS3 with some new firmware with it, and it accessed the registery find that the program was pirated and it didn't allow me to use it anymore.......I wouldn't be pissed. I played with fire, and it burnt me......I would just go out and buy a copy of it!

[Weston-work]

If people can mod the XBOX to play pirated games, why can't they also get it to send M$ a different serial number?

[nicklk]

If people can mod the XBOX to play pirated games, why can't they also get it to send M$ a different serial number?

Its a basic flash of the firmware, the console ID/SN isn't changed and can't be changed.....at least thats what I've been reading on xboxscene...

[Street_Kings]

the part compromised was the drive, which is all we have access to (for the moment)

basically, the hack that exists now is a "man in the middle" attack. It does NOT allow cheating on XBL, as supporters say.

The disc has a checksum, which is checked internally by the system. If one byte is changed, it fails and does not load. Meaning, changed files for cheating == no go. The exploit that was discovered was in the firmware of the DVD drive itself. Basically, you cannot set the booktype of a burned DVD to "X360" or whatever ms presses their discs with; they report back as what type of medium they are. If the checksum of the disc passes, then they check the mediaflag, which the drive is responsible for checking the disc and reporting back to the system if it is a "X360" or "xbox" mediaflag, or other (DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, etc.). Basically the firmware was changed to always report a valid game type, regardless of medium actually in the drive.

What is incredibly intriguing to me is how exactly they detected it. As the drive has been completely compromised (they even left debug routines in the firmware 0.o) so if the system were to request a firmware dump of the drive, if using the newest pirate firmware builds out it would report back the unedited, stock firmware. They even added Disc Jitter to handle challenge types 5/7 (whatever the hell the challege types are, disc jitter is a bit over my head, something about improper block addressing) so the firmware has been touted to be "undetectable." so much for that, obviously 0.o

Everything else is encrypted and read only, incuding the ROM that the serial is stored on. I shouldn't have said EEPROM earlier (it's actually an EPROM) but same deal. Even if we had write access to the chip, it's still encrypted so it wouldn't do any good. I would think the only way to fix a banned console is to swap out the whole physical chip with an unbanned one.

Interesting experiment, though, if anyone is into box hacking, I currently have 4 modded boxes connected to live, downloading a ton of random content to extend the time it would take to detect the consoles. Out of the 4, my hitachi drive was pretty much insta-banned, my spoofed samsung was detected about an hour later, but my two original MS25 drives with 3.2 reporting as MS25's haven't been, and it's been nearly 12 hours now.

[DrJones]

If people can mod the XBOX to play pirated games, why can't they also get it to send M$ a different serial number?

They could, but that doesn't mean it will work.

I could probably go on about this for a while (since I literally just got out of a meeting where we were talking about the exact same topic, of how to prevent a person spoofing a false serial number of a unit to connect to our online service).

What it comes down to, is a serial number is not a random number. Microsoft knows the serial numbers of every unit that is on the market, they also have a good idea when those units were purchased, and where they were purchased.

If you use a random serial number, and try to connect to XBOX live, chances are it won't be an actual serial number, and MS will reject it.

The problem with serial numbers however, is that they are serialized. Thus, it is possible to add or subtract a little from your number, and have a value that would work. The problem with that, is that chances are someone really has that unit, and might be playing or has played online.

One of our solutions, was to store a random number in the firmware, along with the serial number. The serial number is easy to predict, the random number is not. The server and the firmware know both the random number and the serial number, when a device is queried, the random number is also asked for, if they don't match up, throw up a red flag.

That's a very easy solution that pretty much requires you to have physical access to the device. (it'd be easy to catch someone randomly guessing till they get it right)

If our small company with our small product (that would have practically no one that would even be interested in trying to exploit things like this) can come up with that idea, I'm sure MS has many more layers you'd have to break through.

[DrJones]

Its a basic flash of the firmware, the console ID/SN isn't changed and can't be changed.....at least thats what I've been reading on xboxscene...

Just because the raw value can't be changed, doesn't mean a wrong value can't be sent

[Street_Kings]

This is true. Just out of sheer curiosity though, DrJones, assuming your aforementioned process of random number - serial number marriage, what would stop a hacker from simply replaying packets sent from a valid device and authing that way? I don't know where you work (but am curious now =) ) and have no intentions of exploiting your product.

With the 360, everything is so ape shit encrypted that even if you did try to packet intercept and attempt to forge data, you'd first have to gain the encryption key (good luck with that one. you may as well try to guess the key they use to sign all their games with and bypass hacks alltogether), then find when/where ConsoleID is queried/sent, and forge/encrypt the appropriate renegade packet.

[DrJones]

This is true. Just out of sheer curiosity though, DrJones, assuming your aforementioned process of random number - serial number marriage, what would stop a hacker from simply replaying packets sent from a valid device and authing that way? I don't know where you work (but am curious now =) ) and have no intentions of exploiting your product.

With the 360, everything is so ape shit encrypted that even if you did try to packet intercept and attempt to forge data, you'd first have to gain the encryption key (good luck with that one. you may as well try to guess the key they use to sign all their games with and bypass hacks alltogether), then find when/where ConsoleID is queried/sent, and forge/encrypt the appropriate renegade packet.

We discussed doing something similar, where the random number is sent over a secure (ie encrypted) transmission.

The place we drew the line of what is secure and what isn't, basically came down to physical ownership of the device. If someone has the device next to them, than they can do whatever they want. It's just that if someone doesn't have access to the device, then there shouldn't be any way for them to exploit things.

If they did send the same random number and serial number from another device to the server (if they somehow got access to that) then it still wouldn't mean much because the server would talk back to the hacked device using the encryption key it should have, since it won't have that key (and hackers really have no way of changing that key) the data won't encrypt or decrypt properly, and thus the device is kind of worthless at that point.

In our case the only way that would really be possible is if people were able to change the firmware, but that's not really too possible in this case, since no one has access to the firmware (but us) and what the firmware does is quite complicated. It's not something someone could just reverse engineer (and there's no way to read it off the chip). All the sensitive data (Like the random number and private key for encryption) are stored there.

[Street_Kings]

We discussed doing something similar, where the random number is sent over a secure (ie encrypted) transmission.

The place we drew the line of what is secure and what isn't, basically came down to physical ownership of the device. If someone has the device next to them, than they can do whatever they want. It's just that if someone doesn't have access to the device, then there shouldn't be any way for them to exploit things.

If they did send the same random number and serial number from another device to the server (if they somehow got access to that) then it still wouldn't mean much because the server would talk back to the hacked device using the encryption key it should have, since it won't have that key (and hackers really have no way of changing that key) the data won't encrypt or decrypt properly, and thus the device is kind of worthless at that point.

In our case the only way that would really be possible is if people were able to change the firmware, but that's not really too possible in this case, since no one has access to the firmware (but us) and what the firmware does is quite complicated. It's not something someone could just reverse engineer (and there's no way to read it off the chip). All the sensitive data (Like the random number and private key for encryption) are stored there.

Ah I see, I assumed private key encryption was the obvious answer, though if you went: If clientA logged on and clienthacked attempts to log on, deny client hacked due to clientA already logged onto account, it would open up a fun way to fuck with someone by keeping clienthacked on and blocking clientA from logging on. Even worse if: when clienthacked attempted logged on when clientA logged on, drop clientA =X

Not super malicious by any means, and tbh i'm probably the only one out there that would think of doing such a thing, but def a good way to fuck with someone i guess lol.

/me imagines guy two cubicles down cursing his device (if it's a blackberry type thing) for never working right when in reality clienthacked is randomly spamming/replaying his login credentials and deauthing him >=)

Anyway, straying wayyyy off point =) Back to the topic at hand i suppose.

[Bedlam]

What really makes me laugh about all this...they designed the 360 from the ground up with security in mind. People knew this..and tried to mod them anyway? Funny thing is..M$ isnt stupid..they prolly had the "fix" planned all along. :)

[nicklk]

What really makes me laugh about all this...they designed the 360 from the ground up with security in mind. People knew this..and tried to mod them anyway? Funny thing is..M$ isnt stupid..they prolly had the "fix" planned all along. :)

:werd:

The more and more I think about it, its genious on M$'s side

[myshtern]

I wonder if they'll do the same with Vista pirated. Would they be able to?

[Street_Kings]

What really makes me laugh about all this...they designed the 360 from the ground up with security in mind. People knew this..and tried to mod them anyway? Funny thing is..M$ isnt stupid..they prolly had the "fix" planned all along. :)


Obviously, the firmware flaw was not of their planning. A 3rd party company designed the firmware and was sloppy, even leaving complete debug routines on the release version of the drive (rushed launch probably, trying to beat nintendo and sony to market). All of the lost revenue from pirated games for the past year+ this exploit has been in existance doesn't make any sense whatsoever, expecially since the 360 has not been profitable until recently. They definitely did not have the fix the whole time, as in October they attempted to fix the issue in the fall update, and ended up bricking tons of legitimate consoles (google E66 fall for more info). They probably started reaping data this past patch, and waited for the halo 3 beta launch to ensure the maximum amount of people to sign onto live before they started dropping the hammer.

Pirated copies of Vista are totally vulnerable to get nuked at any time lol. Windows Update ensures that. If you pirate something, it's not free. When it gets pulled, work on another workaround, or deal(buy) with it, but by all means there's no room for bitchin.

Whats sad/funny is that I seem to have more fun fucking with the consoles/apps than actually using them. I've logged maybe 10 hours on the 360 this past week and tons more dissecting it and fucking with data. Same with the wii, I have the damn thing open and am tinkering more often than playing.

[Bedlam]

All of the lost revenue from pirated games for the past year+ this exploit has been in existance doesn't make any sense whatsoever, expecially since the 360 has not been profitable until recently.

Whats funny about that, is that the original xbox didnt really become "popular" untill the mods were available for it either..and then all of a sudden there was like an xbox in every gamer household. Talk about some CRAZY brand recognition.. :)

[Street_Kings]

What I really, really want for the 360 is some XBMC360 love, but that won't happen till another hypervisor exploit is found. The media center built is is a whore, I want my dvix/xvid/skins support =(

[nicklk]

What I really, really want for the 360 is some XBMC360 love, but that won't happen till another hypervisor exploit is found. The media center built is is a whore, I want my dvix/xvid/skins support =(

Half the stuff you've said in this post is way over my head lol