The last 2 days have been quite a roller coaster ride for the PSVita hacking scene thanks to a new hack and some fake news. Yesterday, FW 3.71 got hacked with h-encore² then Sony released FW 3.72 and everybody thought the firmware update patched h-encore² by blacklisting Bitter Smile’s demo (i.e its user land entry point) presumably based on this video but apparently, it didn’t and many fell for it including TheFlow himself!

What happened? Can I hack FW 3.72 with h-encore²?

As mentioned in the introduction, almost everybody in the PSVita scene thought that FW 3.72 patched h-encore² thus rendering the latest PSVita firmware without a native hack.

Fake news has no boundaries and it even managed to heavily troll the PSVita’s community! Thankfully, it means that PSVita FW 3.72 is hackable!

However, that doesn’t seem to be the case and apparently, the first report confirming this came from this Spanish-language video by NanospeedGamer demonstrating the hack working perfectly on FW 3.72. A few hours later, TheFlow confirmed that FW 3.72 did not blacklist Bitter Smile via F00D and it can be hacked by h-encore² as the exploit chain stayed fully intact!

According to kood from a tweet by dots_tb, the FW 3.72 update was probably released in order to fix an issue with some PSP games such as Genso Suikoden I & II not being able to launch on FW 3.71 which saw an overhaul to the PSVita’s PSP emulator in order to fix TheFlow’s Trinity exploit chain and introduced some other issues along the way.

TheFlow updates h-encore²’s binaries; releases VitaShell 2.00 with FW 3.72 compatibility – Final h-encore updated with h-encore² support

h-encore2’s binaries have been updated and now, they work with FW 3.72. VitaShell 2.00 has also been released to complement the good news

In light of the above news, TheFlow updated h-encore²’s binaries to work properly with FW 3.72 and has advised people to reinstall h-encore² on their PSVita. Furthermore, he’s also released an updated version of VitaShell bringing about FW 3.72 support and bumping up the version number to 2.00. However, modoru has not been updated with support for FW 3.71/3.72 and downgrading with it still results in a softbrick so refrain from downgrading to FW 3.60/3.65 for now!

Moving to another area about the same subject, Final h-encore 1.9 has now been released with support for h-encore² which means that you can easily install h-encore² with a few clicks without having to follow TheFlow’s 13-point installation guide. To get it, check out this link.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, this whole ordeal will serve as a lesson to developers, reporters and regular end-users alike that a new firmware update may not always patch a recently released hack even if someone claims it does. All in all, it seems that hacked PSVitas are so precious to their owners that a whole day had to pass before somebody decided to take the plunge and verify whether FW 3.72 had really patched h-encore² 😉 Below you can see a gallery of websites and people that fell for it!

h-encore² README (more information + installation guide + TheFlow’s PayPal link + TheFlow’s BitCoin address): https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/h-encore-2

h-encore² GitHub Release Page: https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/h-encore-2/releases

TheFlow’s Patreon (donating): https://www.patreon.com/TheOfficialFloW

Freakler, who’s in h-encore2’s credits also fell for it!

Scene websites, such as GBATemp and Kotaku, also fell for the fake news! We also fell for it 😉

Exchange on Discord between TheFlow and others about FW 3.72 not really patching his hack! (by LightningMods on Twitter)