First Xbox 360 Hack Confirmed News

It was only going to be a matter of time, but a group of hackers called XboxHacker have released video footage of an Xbox 360 running a burnt copy of Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 3 just three months after the next-gen console was released.

Progress on hacking the Xbox 360 was first reported back in the middle of December 2005 just a fortnight after it was launched in North America, when a group calling themselves Team PI Coder announced that they'd managed to extract raw data from thirteen games for the system. Today's news however takes things one step further, although a budding homebrew community on the Xbox 360 is still a way off. Furthermore the hack is still subject to the console's region coding so playing Region 1 DVD imports on R2 Xbox 360s is also unavailable.

XboxHacker confirmed that whilst it was in the business of hacking, it wasn't condoning software piracy, and refused to released the firmware of the hack itself, choosing instead to release the video showing that it worked.

In the time before the Xbox 360 was released, Microsoft announced that it aimed to make the next-gen console the most secure yet thanks to its custom hardware design. Making the statement in September 2005, Chris Satchell from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group said that whilst the console was being made secure on a 'silicon level' he acknowledged that attempts at bypassing the security was something that would be inevitable: "There are going to be levels of security in this box that the hacker community has never seen before...I'm sure sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security."

No doubt there'll be other announcements regarding further inroads being made into the Xbox 360's security system in the future.

We'll have more news shortly...