How a Mini drill tool defeated security on the Xbox 360 | MVG

How to make your Xbox 360 read illegitimate discs: 1. Perform lobotomy on the optical drive controller

tweezers, paperclips, mini-drills... the most mundane common household items that defeated console security a.k.a. the kind of stuff you come up with if you're a hacker

This is literally the peak of "Hardware Modder literally too angry to back off" in Console Modding. XD

I really think that anti-piracy 'locks' essentially adhere to the turn of phrase applied to physical locks; they only keep out people who don't really want to get in that bad.

I was living in Thailand back in the late 2000's and there Xbox piracy was all you had, there were no legal supply chains from Microsoft for the consoles and games, so it was pretty big business. so big I was in a console store there and they had a drill press with a jig on it that took seconds to perform this hack. You basically put the board in the jig, pulled down on the press and it dropped to a set height. The guy there was doing these in bulk and charging like $5 a time. They must have made loads of money.

When people start drilling holes in their PCBs is about the point the hardware security people flip the tables and rage quit. Physical access always means the device belongs to YOU, not to whomever thinks it belongs to THEM. As it should be.

Here in Brazil at that time I was one of the main modders in Sao Paulo City and I remember when the method was released on the forums and I went in the middle of the night to grab a Dremel bit that was proper for this and doing my own Xbox for testing. Next weekend after that I did at least 40, good times good times. Later a template would be release but at first I would just measure with ruler and mark with a pencil the correct spot. A software was kept running and when a loud beep started you knew the spot was hit correctly :)

Crazy how chaotic the inside of the chip looks like, and yet the drill spot is always in the same place. The components seem to be thrown in their haphazardly.

I do like “Mistakes were made”. Quite the history!

Gotta be one of the funniest hacks ever 🤣 Damn clever. You could tell even that Microsoft dude was impressed. I never had to do it, but I would've loved to take the risk ☺️

When you showed the example of a mod gone wrong lol, that dude picked out the biggest drill bit he could find lol

These videos are so interesting! Never would've guessed this is what it used to take to break the 360's security. Would love to see an analysis or explanation on the Xbox One's security. I would imagine Microsoft went to even greater lengths to lock it down this time around to the point where they managed to go a whole console generation without any major hardware exploits.

One of my favourite hacking stories, this one - I remember it also being named the "Geremia method". Bonus trivia: sometimes the wires you shorted by dilling the hole would come apart again after a bit. To repeat the unlock, you needed to either stick the bit back in the hole and wiggle, or click an electronic lighter a couple times near the chip. Apparently the EM noise produced by the piezo was enough to trigger the circuit. Wild times for sure.

I adore stuff like this. It's really a case of "If there's a will, there's a way" Knocking out the bond wires to the die is a pretty clever means of gaining access to signals they wanted you to stay away from. Reminds me of dremmling open those stupid dallas clock chips on my older computers to revive the RTC

I was in this scene heavily back in the day. I never had one drive fail or go wrong. I developed some of the CFW for reset glitch hacked phat consoles, painstakingly using non-complier-based languages (as compiled code was hard to debug even when you had privileged access), and it taught me the high-level foundations of key/vault hardware security. Thanks to the X360, I’m now in a dream career due to the weird obsession I had with reversing the original 2005-11 hardware. 🎉

Physically disconnecting the wires INSIDE the chip package! Holy hell! No wonder physical security is such a big thing nowadays!

I easily did hundreds of these back in the day when I worked for a console shop in eastern europe and only managed to completely brick two boards at the very beginning. After doing a few of these we just eyeballed the bottom of the K letter on the MEDIATEK logo and never marked it. Worked nearly every time and when something went wrong we just put and pressed a solder ball in the hole after flashing and the drive worked again.

This is insane. INSANE. I got out of the Xbox 360 modding scene after JTAG, and I thought that was pretty hardcore. But this. This is just insane.

Any title from MVG that has “defeated security” in the title is a much watch in my book! As always thanks for the wonderful content.

C4eva is a absolute legend. Thanks to him I was able to play so many games it was amazing. I had updated my xbox dvd firmware so often that all the plastic clips on my 360 where gone. Really miss those days.