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.

Source

 

[Song of storms]

Why a gaming console of all things?

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

 

[Rabbid4240]

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

Some teens would pay $90 for a game with just a red square. Why? Because its 1080p.

 

[Itzumi]

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

Point made.

 

[ZachariasBarnham]

Alright, done! No glitch messages for me!

EDIT: I set it to receive messages from 'No One', not even friends.

 

[Deleted User]

View attachment 146431​

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.

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?

 

[BiggieCheese]

Wonder if the PS3 and PSVita could be vulnerable as well, that would suck.

 

[leonmagnus99]

thx for the headsup i will defintely need to check if i have this option ticked on my ps4 later when i get home.

 

[WhiteMaze]

Hear that?

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

 

[MaxiBash]

OOF,
would've been nice if we could load a payload with this

 

[mrissaoussama]

New ps4 exploit incoming ?

 

[lincruste]

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.

 

[AtsuNii]

Sony better respond to this quickly because it could ruin online gameplay for alot of people.

 

[DinohScene]

HTML in the messages?
Stupid zalgo?

This is exactly why we can't have nice things.
Life (and PS4) is great stop ruining it!

 

[MeAndHax]

Does anyone actually know how the message looks like? just curious

 

[Deleted member 445482]

Sony better pull out a stability update quick.

 

[Arras]

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.

 

[SushiKing]

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

 

[YOUCANTSTOPME]

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]

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.

 

[Tizm]

Remember when this glitch happened in Tony Hawk's Underground 2 and it pretty much killed the entire fanbase.

Couldn't Neversoft fix the problem server sided, when the message has over a certain amount of characters it wouldn't send?

 

[kuwanger]

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.