Someone Hacked the Nintendo Switch with the Help of an Old iPhone Exploit

A 19 year old Italian, namely Luca Todesco, has become prominent in iPhone jailbreaking crowd under his fictitious name qwertyoruiop, has just proved that how vulnerabilities in one extremely popular piece of technology can be used again to hack a totally different gadget.

Todesco infected Apple's Webkit browser engine which was used before by an Israeli spy agency contractor, NSO Group, to spy on iPhones and applied the same on the Nintendo Switch. Forbes.com posted on March 14th, 2017, stating "Todesco realized that he could remotely run malicious code on the Switch, showing off his hack on YouTube."

Keeping in view the image of the hacker, anyone did not doubt the authenticity of the exploit but LiveOverflow provided more proof of its authenticity on Sunday showing a video of the exploit in action.

It seems we required further evidence proving the likely usage of some extra months of development by the Switch. It is obviously a problem to allow a console to transport a very old vulnerability but keeping in view that online service of Switch will not be even finalized till it falls which is not at all surprising.

This is only an evidence of concept at present because both LiveOverflow and QWERTY explain. Nobody is going to play duplicate or pirated games on their consoles of Switch yet but hackers now can start striding in that direction. Just like the popularity of Wii U and 3DS for the community of hackers, the Switch- crushing of portability with the power of a home console which is the main target.

The young hacker was lucky with his hack too: he had already written an exploit for the iOS bug. "I had the exploit already written basically." He simply tried it once on the Switch and it stopped the device. Only some extra modification was needed to force the device to execute code.

It is not clear that Nintendo will patch. The Japanese gaming giant had not replied to a request for comment at the time of publication. Todesco believes that Nintendo will issue a fix though it might take some time to reach.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/17/2017