What damage can a trojan horse NSP do?

[Deleted member 572485]

To my understanding CFW atmosphere protects against e-fuses getting blown and the cartridge slot getting updated past the firmware level on the actual NAND. Does it protect against overvolting components on the motherboard? I know there were Pokemon Let's Go games containing malware which overwrote the NAND. Does using emuNAND and backing up your SD card before running a new game protect against this? What is the worst that can happen? Is it worth the risk?

 

[duckbill007]

Trojan horse can rewrite your Hekate ini to run new payload and cause crash or restart to force it to load. And that payload can do almost everything.

 

[Draxzelex]

To my understanding CFW atmosphere protects against e-fuses getting blown and the cartridge slot getting updated past the firmware level on the actual NAND. Does it protect against overvolting components on the motherboard? I know there were Pokemon Let's Go games containing malware which overwrote the NAND. Does using emuNAND and backing up your SD card before running a new game protect against this? What is the worst that can happen? Is it worth the risk?

There is no such thing as a "trojan horse" .NSP file. The only malicious .NSP file to ever be released was one that erases your PRODINO which can easily be recovered with an eMMC backup. What most people don't realize is that is was just a modification of AutoRCM which most brick code usually is; brickers don't have the intelligence to make their own brick code and just modify existing code.

 

[Slluxx]

Trojan horse can rewrite your Hekate ini to run new payload and cause crash or restart to force it to load. And that payload can do almost everything.

any nro can do the same.

 

[faithvoid]

Theoretically, if someone wanted to do some damage, a trojan NSP/NRO could do a lot of things. Delete files off of your SD card, wipe your emuNAND, potentially boot into another payload that could damage your sysNAND, etc. Wouldn't necessarily be the most difficult thing to program or inject into romFS. To my knowledge there was only ever the Pokemon NSP bricker, which as Draxzelex mentioned just wipes your PRODINFO, but if someone was determined to, they could do a fair amount of damage to someone's Switch.

Verify all of your backups against a known working copy's MD5 hash whenever possible and you should be fine, just use common sense and don't install shady unverified things out in the wild.