Tag Archives: hacking

This post was originally written for Guild Wars 2 (specifically in explaining why ArenaNet hasn’t stopped fly hackers stealing orbs in WvW yet), but applies to pretty much any and every online game with damage/fly/wall/aim-bot hacks. In this post, there are two sections: “How does game hacking work?” and “What kinds of hacks are there?” I’m reposting it here after hearing about the recent Final Fantasy XIV hack as it is a “how-in-the-world-was-this-even-allowed-to-happen” example of a network connection hack described in the last section, although technically no game client is even needed in FFXIV’s case and no decryption is necessary …

When the iPod nano 2G was was released late 2006, the first thing we found out was that the firmware was encrypted. Past generations of iPod had unencrypted firmwares/bootloaders that we were able to more or less dump and reverse engineer and eventually understand enough to port iPodLinux to, but this time around, Apple wasn’t so nice. And so went on a long period where no one had made any progress on the platform. In the meanwhile, a few (misguided) users decided that the best way to hack the encrypted iPod nano 2G would be to try to brute force …