PS4 users claim that dangerous messages are causing systems to lock up and crash

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It appears that PlayStation 4 users might need to quickly go tweak their system settings, due to a newly uncovered "hack" in the form of corrupted private messages. Hundreds of users have reported that upon receiving a weird message in their PS4's message inbox, their consoles would freeze up, and not do anything, requiring a full factory reset in order to function again. This glitch can happen to anyone that allows messages from "everybody", so it's highly recommended that for now, you should set messages to friends only. Those unlucky enough to experience the problem find that upon getting the message, their system won't connect to their controller, and if they try to force the system to go back to the menu, it'll still crash when signing into their account. Sony hasn't said anything in regards to the matter at this time.

Even deleting the message from the mobile app doesn’t work. It happened to me during Rainbow Six: Siege. A player from the other team used a dummy account to send the message and crashed my entire team. We all have had to factory reset. Only one of our guys wasn’t affected and he has his messages private. Do this ASAP to prevent this from happening to you.

This just happened to me during Rocket League. Got a message then after a minute my controller stopped working and everything went silent. Now I can’t access the home menu. It just goes to the ‘Report Problem’ screen every time

You can protect yourself from such problems if you go to settings, account management, privacy settings, and then personal info/messaging.

:arrow: Source
 
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It appears that PlayStation 4 users might need to quickly go tweak their system settings, due to a newly uncovered "hack" in the form of corrupted private messages. Hundreds of users have reported that upon receiving a weird message in their PS4's message inbox, their consoles would freeze up, and not do anything, requiring a full factory reset in order to function again. This glitch can happen to anyone that allows messages from "everybody", so it's highly recommended that for now, you should set messages to friends only. Those unlucky enough to experience the problem find that upon getting the message, their system won't connect to their controller, and if they try to force the system to go back to the menu, it'll still crash when signing into their account. Sony hasn't said anything in regards to the matter at this time.





You can protect yourself from such problems if you go to settings, account management, privacy settings, and then personal info/messaging.

:arrow: Source
Holy shit. This is kind of like a virus. I hope Sony learns from this. Having to factory reset and possibly lose saves or data because of an issue like this is unacceptable in my opinion. What do you guys think?
 

lincruste

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This sort of thing has to stop. Companies need to be more mindful of the dangers of Unicode or go back to ASCII. There have already been attacks against iPhone users and such, but for whatever reason, companies don't seem to account for the handful of users that will spam Unicode until they find something to wreak havoc on the devices of others.

This is rapidly becoming the phreaking of it's time. Although, instead of needing a complex series of beeps to get free long distance, any script kiddie can copy and paste symbols or strings to deny or damage the devices of others.
But we don't know if this hack is unicode related. It might as well be based on metadatas or rendering, or anything else.
 

Arras

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Holy shit. This is kind of like a virus. I hope Sony learns from this. Having to factory reset and possibly lose saves or data because of an issue like this is unacceptable in my opinion. What do you guys think?
Supposedly you can fix this without factory resetting the entire console by going into Recovery Mode and rebuilding the system database.
 
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YOUCANTSTOPME

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You know when updates come out that fixes "stability issues" and all of you like to laugh? Yeah, this is the kind of crap they fix.

I hope an update comes out this week.
 

Jonna

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Sounds fake.Untill i see evidence of this bricking someones console i dont think this is really happening,atleast not to a majority of people.
To be fair, this isn't something you could try to record. It's random, so unless you want to set up a camera on a tripod running 24/7 for a very long time and have the PS4 running that same amount of time, you won't be able to catch it.

And if we could replicate some one doing it, we could be fixing it properly and we wouldn't be worrying about it any more anyways.
 

kuwanger

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Consoles are mostly marketed to teenagers. A lot of teenagers think with their dicks. Puberty is a bitch.

Yes, that explains why sex spam malware is a totally new thing targeted at a mostly teen demographic.

That is the collective sound of the communications department at Sony Headquarters getting fired!

Just like at Apple.

This is easily fixed if you only allow messages from 'Friends only' settings.

Unless your friend decides to "prank" you because there is apparently a work around (log in on other device, delete message, rebuild database). Not having a PS4 at all, can you play with non-friends in games and at all send messages in games to non-friends? If so and depending on exactly where the bug is, you could still crash various games even if it doesn't result in a crash loop.
 
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