Nintendo Switch: Team Xecuter have an upcoming exploit, state it will work on all firmwares (video)
Team Xecuter (famous among other things for their work on Xbox and Xbox 360) just announced they are bringing a hack to the Nintendo Switch. They say their “solution” will work on any firmware. As a teaser for the upcoming release, they’ve published a video showing a custom boot of the Nintendo Switch (video below).
Their statement below:
This solution will work on ANY Nintendo Switch console regardless of the currently installed firmware, and will be completely future proof. This is *the* solution for opening up CFW (Custom FirmWare) on the Nintendo Switch. We want to move the community forward and provide a persistent, stable and fast method of running your own code and custom firmware patches on Nintendo’s latest flagship product. And we think we’ve succeeded! 🙂
Team Xecuter is historically heavily focused on hardware mods enabling piracy. Therefore it is not a stretch to think that what they’re working on for the Switch will also be a DRM-filled hardware modification, that they’ll make available for sale on typical online hardware mod retailers.
This announce is made following the recent 34c3 talk on Switch hacks by Plutoo, Derrek, and Naehrwert, in which the hackers announced a homebrew loader was coming for Nintendo Switch running on firmware 3.0.0. Conversely, Team Xecuter are teasing that their solution will work “regardless of the currently installed firmware”.
The console hacking scene has always seen a strong divide between “homebrew” hackers and the piracy scene. It seems the Switch will be no exception, with some hackers already stating they will not be using Team Xecuter’s product.
Team Xecuter announced their “solution” will be available in Spring 2018.
Although they’ve provided some decryption key for the bootloader as proof that they know what they’re talking about (for technically skilled people to verify), there’s always a possibility that this never gets released due to other issues. Team Xecuter have hinted in the past at some Xbox One hack that never saw the light of day (although, in their defense, it was never really announced); and we’ve seen other hardware hack ambitions fail in the console world as well once more open solutions were made available to the scene (think of the Cobra Blackfin on the Vita).
Source: Team Executer, via @smealum
Insert Ordinal number
Cudos, best way of writing ‘first’ i have ever seen 😀
Oh, yes! But what about online play? You’d need a patch for that ,yes?
Do you need a patch to play online now?
So *** are you going on about?
I was talking about if you had cfw with pirate games? dummy.
Wasn’t the Xbox 360 the only one that had an issue with online play? I’ve had hacks/mods on PS3, Wii, Vita, 3DS and Wii U that would allow me to go online without any patches. Only reason you needed anything for the Xbox 360 was because their security could pick up hardware mods very easily….
My jailbroken PS3 got banned like a week after going online with it. There was a PSN patch app people suggested using. Which I did but I still was banned.
They had a harder time picking up flashed disc drives towards the end. RGH and JTAG are easily detected and result in a banned key vault.
Usually its the PS* scene that’s full of pussies that don’t release anything until someone leaks it, then they have a huge cry about it, threaten to leave and keep crying for the next 6 months and *** about it forever. The NintenDOH and Xboned scenes are usually really good and things get released like they should.
But in the black fin’s defense vita just never got the love it deserved thanks to sony and their mind boggling attempts to save it it really didn’t have enough AAA games to even need the fin.
Too early, I would have preferred to see something like this in at least 2 years time.
By then it would be too late, and we’d be stuck with the same situation with the vita where 0 dev happens now because they gave up on 3.61+
Lmao, this is Nintendo we’re talking about now…
Too early? Nintendo made a *** ton of money in Switch sales. It sold more than the Wii U in 10 months than the Wii U sold in its entire lifespan. “Too early…”
So… the Wii U sold about 13 millions unities in it lifespan.
Switch in 10 months sold about 8 millions.
I know I’m not a genius but I’m failling hard to see how 8 is more than 13?
Maybe you’re talking about the fast-selling phenom? Or launching frame time between the two?
You have to remember that Switch is Nintendo’s only console in the long run (3DS is still on the market and selling good, but it’s going to be discontinued in a few years). Since the NES generation, Nintendo always had a console+handheld on the market. This is a big change in their business model and revenue stream. It NEEDS to sell big, because it’s doing the work of two game platforms. Switch only selling reasonably well would be bad news for Nintendo (no, they aren’t in danger of going bankrupt, but Switch merely selling “good” would mean Nintendo’s marketshare and relevance dying off)
Probably the most idiotic statement I’ve read in quite awhile, and I just came from the YouTube comment section. Mind sharing how you know so much about Nintendo’s marketshare/relevance future? Because, they’re going to keep dropping these mini systems. They’re going to keep making mobile games. They’re gonna keep milking the Pokemon franchise for merchandise, movies, etc. They keep producing successful items no one can figure out how to sell such as handhelds and motion controls. They have the deepest and most storied first party stable in gaming history.
In the modern gaming history, meaning the last 35-40 years, not only have they never faced financial trouble, they’ve been at forefront of gaming. Nintendo has never even come close to being irrelevant, despite predictions of their demise. So how in the world do you know they won’t release a cheap handheld with a longer battery life than the Switch? Or partner with a company to produce a phone? Or some other innovation/gimmick? Anyone that knows gaming history should know that predicting what Nintendo “needs” to do to be successful is an asinine endeavor.
Which would be nice if piracy affected sales in any meaningful way. They factually do not. Categorically. Dreamcast failed because of the PS2 and lack of DVD, to say nothing of the fact that SEGA was out of money by then anyway and couldn’t fund any major products or marketing pushes.
DS, 360, Wii, PSP all had massive piracy by year 2. The DS was the easiest of them all and sold among the best and the PSP stayed alive because of piracy/homebrew in the early days and somehow managed to survive and turn Sony a very tidy profit. Meanwhile, the PS3, Vita, Xbox One have fended off piracy quite successfully and somehow didn’t break any sales records. The PS3 and Vita got hacked but again no dip in sales when it happened and for the PS3 software sales were going stronger than ever.
The only system that explicitly failed because of piracy was the Famicom Disk System. It had notably poor software sales once the general public in Japan learned how easy it was to pirate for it. Nintendo killed it explicitly because of piracy realities and concerns and thus battery backups plans were accelerated and the disk system became irrelevant with cheaper memory chips finishing off its purpose. But even without piracy the system was finicky and unlikely to succeed well, especially in the American market where consumers were very weird in their purchasing habits and expectations.
Piracy only helps homebrew. Explicitly, categorically and factually. It fast tracks low level access, almost always, and therefore while homebrew can certainly work without it, with it it always always thrives.
So, if you’re into homebrew then you’d be silly to dismiss piracy as anything but a reality and hardly threatening except the most extreme outlier cases.
The majority will still be buying games, especially since it’s a Nintendo console where most of the base are casuals.
What’s a casual?
That would be awesome, since Odyssey shipped with FW 3.01 🙁
Yup! Free switch games for everyone
Hardware modificitation…yuck.Soldering the Switch motherboard is sin.
Its also extremely easy to open a switch and get to the main board.
..and why is that? Because you don’t know how?
Grow up, any progress is great. Besides, it isn’t confirmed to be hardware or software yet. Just good news and video from a reliable team. 🙂
There’s a good chance it’ll be solderless IMO, the EMMC is completely removable. If i had to guess, this ‘product’ would either replace the NAND, or sit in between it and the main board, and not require any soldering.
I don’t think it will be between the emmc and the motherboard. That’s only data, if it can be done by only modifying data on the emmc nand then a simple hardware flasher would be enough, your typical sd card reader connected to the emmc (as it uses sd card protocol). TX would not be able to make any money from it. So they need to have something that probably glitches the gpu/cpu, and also they are probably working on making the method difficult to reverse engineer, so as to avoid the chinese making knock-off chips for as long as possible.
RIP Switch! Embarassing for the morons at reswitched who said this wasn’t gonna happen for years hahaha
FREE GAMES!
Switch would be really (!) great for Homebrew. Imagine all the horsepower for mobile emulation…
But I hope this won’t lead to piracy. Big N doesn’t deserve it. They made a great product.
This sounds great, and is something I’m really looking forward to.
I hope there will be some solutions available to dump my games. I’m physical only on the Switch, but would really welcome it to not having to wear my game cards with me all the time.
And playing my favorite Game Boy and Sega Game Gear games on the Switch is a dream to come true.
Also I love soldering stuff like modchips into my consoles. I have modified every console I had where it was possible. Like 50/60Hz switch on the Sega Mega Drive/Nomad, JTAG on Xbox 360, etc. So that’ll probably be my favorite part.
Seeing that their logo displays before the Nintendo logo just proved they either patched the bootloader or boot theirs first…
Soldering is my art this hack was made for me
Killing the switch games creation too soon..
piracy rarely kills a console, it usually actually helps it.
Man, I get the argument, but there are plenty of examples where piracy seriously damaged a console.
DS/PSP/Wii in particular come to mind. Software sales on those systems were super low after piracy started taking off.
Really I never heard of this in fact I heard the complete opposite where software sales were at a all time high.
Usually if a software sells like *** on either console it’s usually because it’s a port of a console title for the higher end consoles at the time like the ps3/xbox 360
Some people would beg to differ, and actually argue that piracy helped the PSP gain popularity.
I don’t know how substantiated those claims are – it seems everyone lives in a bubble of their own impressions and it’s an incredibly hard thing to put hard statistics behind, so we’re left to guess based on perceptions.
Wii -Hacked in 2007, homebrew channel 2008. Lifetime tie ratio – 9.5.
Major release after hacked:
Super Smash Bros. Brawl 2008 11.49 Million,
Mario Kart Wii 2008 34.26 Million,
New Super Mario Bros. Wii 2009 27.88 Million,
Wii Fit Plus 2009 20.86 Million
Wii Sports Resort 2009 31.89 Million
X360 – hacked in 2007, Lifetime tie ratio – 11.74
Major release after hacked:
Of the 9 best selling games in the console’s history, all selling over 10 million a piece, only 1 was released in 07 or before. Not counting Kinect Adventures, it’s 7 best seeling games came after it was hacked.
DS hacked in 2005 Lifetime tie ratio – 5.45, highest of all handhleds
has basically been hacked since inception and is the greatest selling console of all time with 10 games selling more than 10 million and 5 games selling more than 20 million.
You got me on the PSP, though it can be argued with with a 3.77 tie ratio, being Sony’s first handheld and competition from the DS, that’s the best it was going to do anyway.
TL;DR There is no evidence piracy has hurt any console and I had to much time on my hands tonight.
Pretty sure the software attach rate of the Wii is the highest of all systems ever.
As long as it allows save backups, that’s all I want.
Perhaps a homebrew solution for the Virtual console will be released before Nintendo gets around to it lol
RIP Switch. Too soon.
Do PS4 instead. It’s dying already
Sales say otherwise, PS4 still going strong. Leave kid.
The DS, 360, PSP and Wii were all hacked for piracy by year 2. Each of those systems broke records in their own right. Meanwhile the PS3 and Vita for most of their lives were a fortress against piracy. Didn’t save them a single sale. The PS3 only turned around, ironically, after Sony’s major breach and compensation, then after that they kept Plus being useful and generous. Go figure, consumers flocked.
Piracy doesn’t kills systems. Poor management and software does. Period.
well said,and,as the owner of hundreds of games,i am quite happy with this news 🙂
The PS3 turned around in 2009 with the release of the slim and their strong European market. The breach came 2 years later.
when has a console being hacked hurt the console?
Be very wary of this.
This is not the original Team Xecuter this is another Max Louarn scam like the ps4 game swap chip.
The original Team X ceased to exist several years ago and the website was sold to Max.
This device will not be support nor up-gradable and work after a new firmware release from the big N
Is this true ? How do you know that Team Xecuter is no more ? I can’t find any mention about it anywhere, and if it is true it would explain why no progress was made for the Xbox 360 Winchester board or fot the Xbox One series.
Sounds about right. It’s been several years since I frequented TX forums (jtag 360 days) and I haven’t followed what became of them.
This product reminds me of the Undiluted Platinum PSP modchip (DMS / Divineo product) with a hybrid fw written to the chip which runs at boot, and a button press to boot to ofw. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same concept, and same usual suspects behind it too.
It’s interesting though. Let’s see if the pressure on the scene devs builds to a point they roll out a free alternative to combat the financial gain.
Not even the PS3’s security was flawed after the dongles and CFWs. This will not be a permanent CFW (if it’s ever released).
Someone has no idea what he’s talking about.
Please, do tell. If you are not capable of, please don’t say anything.
It’s hardware, it’s permanent, fool.
Thank you for the free insult. You’ve demonstrated your overwhelming intelligence.
Pop quiz, hot shot: will Nintendo stand on the corner without releasing a hardware revision?.
It is completely possible with modchips and other hardware mods. Remember how the 3ds was hackable on any firmware as long as you were willing to do some soldering and hardmod it? It’s the same here, except i doubt soldering will be necessary since the switch has a modular EMMC, so it would be easy with an adaptor / intermediary board to hack, and is unpatchable since software updates can only edit the nand.
That was my main doubt about this “future proof” CFW. Dongles are the best approach in my opinion but can be rendered completly useless with a simple hardware revision (even a software update could do it if the exploit is not in the early boot stages). On the other hand, complex hardware mods can give you the keys to the kingdom but they are not user-friendly and requires tools, electronic components and skills to apply to the console without damaging it.
Ummmmm… what? The 3DS never required you to hardmod to hack it. The ‘hardmod’ was to dump your sysNAND in case you messed it up and needed to roll it back (or got sc*** il/legitimately by Gateway’s bricking).
i never did it, but i’m certain you can install cfw via hardmod
a la
https://3ds.guide/installing-boot9strap-(hardmod)
If it is a glitch chip then more than likely it is bulletproof a la 360 RGH. It directly attacks the CPU very early in booting up and updates to add fixes to security would be run after the console was already compromised. The only solution was to revamp the hardware but then new ways to do the attack were found rendering MS’ efforts useless again. It may use the Nvidia backdoor, but I can’t find info showing if that is able to be patched or not.
The main reason Xbox 360 was able to gain so early hacks was possible to the fact that early prototype boards were stolen during the final stages of development of the board. Also the fact that the 360 basic hardware (CGPU, memory, and number of POST trace left on the board) didn’t change until the Winchester variety, the very final board that the CGPU is actually different and doesn’t have POST traces on it. That’s why the Winchester is still unhackable and to the fact that it was at it’s “End of life” period and no one gave two f**ks about 360s anymore, not even hacking communitys.
That’s completely inaccurate. Without the 1BL, we had nothing, with 1BL, we had a chance, and that wasnt through early access to dev kits, as tmbinc said, the 360 was open to timing attacks, KK & jtag just came earlier.
MS not signing the drive firmware was key to the drive hacks.
They couldve ended it all sooner but chose not to (and still do)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t homebrew devs made those glitcher and freeboot and Team Xecuter just mass-produced those RGH glitcher chips?
i’m trying not to get too hyped so will wait and see. also what if it’s trying to trick people into updating past 3.0.0? maybe that’s too much conspiracy theory…
I love seeing things like this, but I would like to see it in a few years, the switch is off to an amazing start but this has the potential to turn it into another PSP situation, where piracy stops the systems progression almost entirely in its tracks, with 3ds, it’s such an established console that half the user base could be on CFW and it wouldn’t matter, the switch hasn’t even reached 20 mill world wide sales and it’s only got a handful of good titles (not including Indies) give it a year or 2, then release mods all you like, at that point piracy won’t hurt it as much
Great job tx, better than attention freaks teasing people and never actually releasing the exploit but hoarding it.
“completely future proof”. Seem like Nintendo need to release another set of Switch with patched motherboard. Just like PSP days…
Well.. I always glad when somebody have or find a way to hack one or other console. But this time it’s bad thing. It’s too early to do that. Console don’t have a lot games. So if this console will be hacked all creators not release they games for Switch. I was more glad to hear that PS4 or X1 was hacked. It was 100 times better. But.. Maybe this help to move PS4 and X1 to the hacked status.
the 360 being released within its first year says hi. it sure didnt recieve any 3rd party support after it was hacked am i right? >_>
>be nintendo wii
>softmodded by 2008
…
>bestselling console of all time
hacks arent just piracy. even if we get a full fledged switch virtual console library from N, i still want to emulate ps1/psp…
If for this need special device – it will be cool!!!!
I don’t think it will be between the emmc and the motherboard. That’s only data, if it can be done by only modifying data on the emmc nand then a simple hardware flasher would be enough, your typical sd card reader connected to the emmc (as it uses sd card protocol). TX would not be able to make any money from it. So they need to have something that probably glitches the gpu/cpu, and also they are probably working on making the method difficult to reverse engineer, so as to avoid the chinese making knock-off chips for as long as possible.
Looks like it’s time to buy a Switch. Thanks Team Xecuter!