As far as I know, efforts to hack the Xbox 360 have been mostly foiled by the hardware and software protection onboard (though, yes, I know that certain models with certain drives and at a certain update can be hacked, in this article I will refer to widespread hacks, like the original Xbox has). Why bring this up? I was looking at the Xbox website today and heard about how those who don’t hook their Xbox up to the internet can download updates on their computer, burn them to a CD/DVD and load them into the Xbox with that.

This sounds like an excellent attack vector for Xbox hackers. One small bug in the code for authenicity verification of the software could allow unsigned code to be loaded. Another possibility is that the encryption used on the downloaded files could be broken and their format reverse engineered. This would let you put things on the Xbox and it wouldn’t know the difference between something from Microsoft and something from elsewhere.

This sounds like a fun possibility to me. If only I had the time to devote to such a thing. Oh well, I know there’s people nerdier than me that will do it. Here’s hoping homebrew software on the 360 takes off soon!