Trojan Could Brick Your PSP

MEDIA CENTER PC NEWS

October 7th 2005

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'Bricking' is the ignoble art of reducing a formerly useful and fully functional piece of electronic hardware to a useless...brick. The PSP is the latest gadget to suffer, with the discovery of a trojan that targets Sony's handheld.

The Trojan.PSPBrick virus masquerades as a utility for rolling back the device's firmware from the current 2.0 vesion to an older 1.5 version. You would only want to do this if you were interested in running homebrew applications or pirated games, but plenty do and the virus creator is cashing in on this desire to turn the PSP into something more than just a portable console.

You actually have to choose to install the trojan, so you won't pick it up just by wandering within range of another infected device. For this reason Symantec have called the virus a Category One threat, so it has a long way to go to reach the Category Five maximum.

If you do get infected, the trojan will delete key system files rendering your PSP permenantly useless. Sony won't help you as they would argue that you shouldn't have run modding software anyway. Your only hope is to buy a replacement PSP motherboard which are currently retailing for around $100 on the web.

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