Sony Awarded a Hacker $50,000 for Privately Reporting a PS5 Exploit He Found With AI — Now He's Public Enemy Number One

A hacker sparked an uproar within the PlayStation 5 homebrew scene for privately reporting an exploit to Sony and cashing in on a $50,000 reward, rather than keeping it confidential for the community.

A hacker who goes by the handle “Jordy” was awarded the bounty from Sony for reporting a vulnerability — found using AI — on the PS5 console. The bug was reported to HackerOne, a site that works with companies to plug issues in their products and services. Essentially, Sony pays hackers to find exploits, then pays them money not to release them until the security hole has been patched.

There wouldn’t normally be anything particularly unusual about a hack being reported to Sony — but in the case of this PS5 exploit, a prominent security engineer discovered it months ago but wanted to hold onto it until GTA 6 launched. Then Jordy discovered it with AI and reported it, triggering the controversy.

The exploit in question is a ‘Hypervisor Bug’ that affects the PS5 on firmware from 13.60 up to 14.00. A hypervisor bug is a fault inside the core software or firmware layer, which allows hackers to execute kernel code to, for example, boot Linux on a machine not designed to do it.

You might have seen a spate of headlines about how AI has fueled an explosion of hacks across the internet. Information security experts are calling this month ‘Black October’ due to several major security incidents and vulnerability disclosures prompted by the growing use of artificial intelligence in research.

Google security engineer Andy Nguyen, aka theflow0, had been working on getting Linux running on PS5 for months. Indeed, back in March, theflow0 showcased the results of his work. But Jordy’s AI-powered bug report put an end to that work. “I am stepping away from the PS5 scene and stopping all my work on PS5 Linux,” he said. “After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink.

“The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony.”

In a conversation with IGN, Jordy admitted using generative AI to find the bug that netted him $50,000. He claimed that theflow0 found the bug back in 2025 but had kept it secret. When Jordy announced he’d found a hypervisor bug himself, theflow0 reached out to see if it was the same one he found the year before. Jordy and theflow0 initially agreed to not report the bug to HackerOne, but another researcher quickly found the same bug shortly after. Jordy made the decision to report the bug as other researchers stumbled on it by using generative AI, closing the window to claim the bounty from Sony.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/50000-dollar-ps5-exploit-found-with-ai