Sony just paid $50,000 to a hacker. This is the maximum amount of its reward program for finding bugs in PlayStation 5, but this figure is not zero considering that this hacker used AI to find bugs.
Because he said how they broke the security at the lowest level of the console and along the way, he not only made money but also disliked a lot of people. Because this is a story of treachery among hackers (and I’m not exaggerating one bit).
In short. The hacker is called Jordy and uses the alias 2tonejordy on the platform from which Sony operates its ‘Bug Hunter’ program. In this, anyone who finds a console failure can report it for a reward. Sony patch it and holy easter. The thing is, on October 14, Jordy posted a screenshot of the payment to his X account, joking that “at least it will pay me to buy ‘GTA VI’.”
$50,000 is the program’s maximum and, as we read on Dexerto, only one other person has received that amount in recent years. The reason for the amount is that this ‘loot’ is reserved for those who discover critical vulnerabilities and nothing more important than blowing up the PS5 hypervisor.
Jordi’s tweet
failure. The hypervisor is a software layer that separates the console system from the hardware and controls what code can run. It’s like the machine’s last line of defense against a program not signed by Sony that can talk directly to the processor. Bypassing the hypervisor opens the door to modifying the PS5.
In fact, they’re already doing it, and at an impressive pace, spurred on by Sony’s latest anti-consumer move and active agility by code development and reverse engineering for artificial intelligence tools.
Background. Earlier this year, another researcher named Andy Nguyen (who is a Google security expert) used such a vulnerability to install Linux on the PS5. He showed the console booting Linux and running ‘GTA V’ with ray tracing enabled, and then published the entire project on GitHub. The bottom line is that this is a temporary change that needs to be repeated every boot and requires a console with older firmware. The good thing about it is that if you run it, you have a PS5 running Linux, but if not, it’s just a normal PS5. It’s the best of a PC and a console in a single machine.
Nguyen had another hypervisor bug that the Japanese haven’t fixed in recent months’ updates. Along with this, it plans to extend Linux compatibility to new console firmware and models like PS5 Pro and wait to release it after ‘GTA VI’. Because, contrary to what is sometimes thought, the spirit of hacking (one of them) is to demonstrate programming skills to oneself and the community.
I say this because Nguyen himself wanted to drop the ‘bomb’ after Rockstar Games launched in 2027 so that people could legitimately buy it. The idea was that users could legally update the console to run ‘GTA VI’ and at the same time, still have the possibility to convert the machine to a Linux system due to the fact that Sony had not patched the flaw.
Gwen’s tweet
Controversy. However, Jordy came forward to tell Sony that this was a bug they could patch…after giving the award. According to Tom’s Hardware, when Jordy claimed to have found the bug, Nguyen agreed to wait a few days before sending the report to Sony. Ultimately, the report reached the company within a day.
The defense that Jordy puts forward, and we see at IGN, is that, like him, more people would have used AI to find these bugs and if he hadn’t given the warning, someone else would have. The result was that Nguyen announced that he was leaving the PS5 scene and the Linux project, calling those who use AI “slop kiddies”. It would be something like “AI Shit Babies”, more or less, with Geordie in it And the Twitter message that shows the payment, shames them.
“It was about a bunch of talented researchers, but now it’s about a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks. They don’t even understand. Some slop kiddie found the only remaining hypervisor bug, which I found a while back, and decided to tell Sony about it” – Nguyen
Overwhelming? Criticism of Jordi has focused on breaking these pending contracts, bragging about paying the network and using AI to find flaws. I already said that part of the fun of hackers is proving their abilities to themselves, which is why they see AI as a shortcut and, moreover, as something that has flooded and saturated several reward programs that they have been working on for some time.
As we see on Kotaku, some members of the community would have preferred a collective reward for the exploit and kept it away from Sony. But well, aside from that, the whole wave of Vibe coding, along with Sony’s recent decision and people’s anger over the current state of the video game industry, has brought the PS5 into the spotlight. Emulators are being developed and we already know how to break system security.
And if Sony is worried, so is Rockstar as there are rumors that ‘GTA VI’, possibly the most expensive game in history, could run on PC or consoles without an official launch by loading illegal copies hours or days after its November 19 launch.
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