The PS5 Is Getting Cracked Wide Open, and Sony Is Playing Whack-a-Mole Before GTA 6

Six years into its life, the PS5 is having its worst month for security yet. A public jailbreak, a fake “PlayStation Store” stuffed with more than 1,600 pirated games, a $50,000 bug bounty, a firmware lockout, a hacker claiming to have cracked the newest firmware, and the scene’s biggest name storming off in a huff. All of it is happening four weeks before GTA 6 launches on 19 November. Here’s what’s actually going on, and what Sony is doing about it.

How we got here

• The keys leaked (January 2026). Around New Year, what are reported to be the PS5’s BootROM keys were posted online. They’re burned into the console’s chip at the factory, so no firmware update can change them on the roughly 95 million PS5s already out there. They don’t jailbreak a console by themselves, but they make it much easier for hackers to pull Sony’s boot code apart. Sony has never commented.
• Relapse goes public (29 September). A kernel exploit called Relapse was released that worked on firmware up to 13.60, from July. Paired with a hypervisor bypass, it lets a jailbroken PS5 run homebrew and, inevitably, pirated games.
• The fake store (mid October). A homebrew app called Overdrive appeared, styled like the PlayStation Store and offering more than 1,600 PS4 and PS5 games pulled from file-hosting sites.

How Sony is fighting back

• Firmware 14.00 and 14.10. 14.00 (16 September) broke the hypervisor bypass, and 14.10 (1 October) closed the hole Relapse used. Sony’s patch notes just say “security fixes”, as always.
• The PSN lockout. According to reports from the homebrew scene, consoles now need 14.10 to sign in to PSN. If you stay on old firmware to keep a jailbreak, you lose online play, the Store and, for some digital games, the ability to check your licence.
• Overdrive goes dark. The store vanished about two days after launching, around 14 October. The scene says Sony’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist. Neither Sony nor the developer has confirmed that. Within hours, clones were on GitHub, and at least one already lists more than 1,800 games.
• A $50,000 cheque. Security researcher 2tonejordy reported a high-severity hypervisor bug through the PlayStation Bug Bounty, and posted that Sony paid the top-tier $50,000 and patched it. They also joked that it would at least pay for GTA 6.
• Bans? One user says their jailbroken PS5 and PSN account were banned after it went online. That’s one report, not a confirmed crackdown, but it’s a clear warning.

The drama: TheFlow quits

That $50,000 bug didn’t go down well. Andy Nguyen (TheFlow), a Google security engineer and the best-known PS5 hacker, had been using it for his PS5 Linux project. It turns a launch PS5 into a sort of Steam Machine, and he’s had GTA V running with ray tracing on it. Reports say he asked for the bug to be kept quiet, at least until GTA 6 came out. 2tonejordy reported it anyway, saying someone else had found the same bug hours later with AI tools and was about to report it.

Nguyen’s response was to walk away from the PS5 scene indefinitely and stop work on Linux, including the planned PS5 Pro support. He also had a go at inexperienced devs using AI chatbots to hunt for exploits. Whether this particular bug really was found with AI hasn’t been confirmed.

And now 14.10 might be cracked too

On 19 October, South Korean homebrew developer Gezine posted a video of a PS5 on firmware 14.10, the version Sony just shipped, showing the hidden Debug Settings menu. You normally need kernel-level access to get there. Gezine hasn’t explained how, hasn’t released anything, and said they’re “gonna ask for disclosure later”, which suggests the bug bounty route. A kernel exploit alone isn’t enough to run pirated games on 14.10. That would also need a working hypervisor bypass, and there isn’t a public one.

Why does 14.10 matter so much? Dataminers report that GTA 6 needs firmware 14.10 to run. Rockstar and Sony haven’t confirmed that, but if it’s true, anyone on old firmware for their jailbreak won’t be able to play the biggest game of the generation without updating and losing it.

What we can’t verify

• Sony hasn’t said a word publicly about any of this: the key leak, Relapse, Overdrive or Gezine. Everything about Sony’s response comes from patch behaviour, the bounty screenshot and the homebrew scene.
• The Overdrive cease-and-desist is unconfirmed, and so is the single ban report.
• The GTA 6 firmware requirement comes from datamining, not Rockstar.
• Gezine’s 14.10 exploit is a video, not a release. We can’t check how far it actually goes.

Our take

Let’s be clear about something the scene doesn’t like hearing. Homebrew and Linux on a console you own are cool. A fake PlayStation Store handing out 1,600 games for free is just piracy with a nice UI, and it’s exactly what gets the cool stuff shut down. Nguyen spent years building PS5 Linux, and it’s the Overdrive crowd that turned every hypervisor bug into something Sony has to kill on sight.

As for Sony, it’s doing what it can: patch, lock old firmware out of PSN, pay researchers to report bugs instead of selling them, and lean on anyone running a pirate store. But leaked BootROM keys can’t be fixed on 95 million consoles, so this is whack-a-mole for the rest of the PS5’s life. The real move might be the boring one: if GTA 6 needs 14.10, most people will update on 19 November and Sony wins this round without lifting a finger.

And the AI angle is the bit to keep an eye on. If someone found a $50,000 hypervisor bug with a chatbot within hours of a pro finding it, the old deal where a handful of experts sit on exploits for years is over. That’s bad news for TheFlow, and honestly it might not be great for Sony either.

Our advice: don’t download sketchy “stores” or payloads from randoms, don’t take a jailbroken console online, and don’t moan when your PSN account gets nuked if you do.

Team homebrew, team “just buy the game”, or team “I just want Linux on my PS5”? Tell us in the comments, or come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.

Sources

• Spawn Wave: Chaos Hits The Gaming Industry & Sony Responds As PS5 Hacking Accelerates
• Engadget: The latest PlayStation firmware may have already been cracked ahead of GTA 6 (20 Oct)
• Notebookcheck: PS5 jailbreak on latest 14.10 firmware shared before GTA 6 (20 Oct)
• Notebookcheck: Sony blocks PS5 jailbreak from PSN, requiring firmware 14.10 (15 Oct)
• LevelUp: Sony rewards user who found critical PS5 flaw (16 Oct)
• TechSpot: Sony shut down Overdrive, but clones appeared within hours
• PC Games Hardware (German): PS5 Linux developer ends work after the “last” bug is reported
• Notebookcheck: Sony faces an unfixable PS5 vulnerability as BootROM keys are dumped (January)
• iXBT Games: Hacked PS5 banned by Sony (single user report)