For those of you that don't follow the underground scene, Blacklisted411 is an established hacking magazine with over 20 years under its belt. Lucky for us, their newest issue (.pdf) has some nice dirt on a (fake) Xbox 360 modchip courtesy of Ustler. For those of you that are technically inclined or just like reading that kind of stuff, check out the full article. For those of you that don't want to deal with that, I'll do a little paraphrasing.

Basically, Ustler was able to uncover that icemodchip.com (the website of the 'chip') is linked to infinitymods.com (a supposed reseller) and rarecodes.com (a Socom cheat forum turned webhosting service with no valid payment mechanism? wtf?). He also dug up some dirt on the owner. Apparently SkyD A.K.A. Evan O'Keefe is the owner of the sites. He's a long-time forum lurker many-time banned internet persona with some interesting trails all over the place (including some personal pictures...). Contacts from highly reputable sources within the Xbox underground confirm that no real samples have ever been seen or tested, all of the videos of 'proof' are fake, and any attempts to meet 'Team I.C.E.' in person have been met with excuses and lies. His train of negative eBay feedback isn't good for his image, either. The claims on his hosting site of four years in service and 42 servers are completely false as all 3 sites appear to be virtually hosted on one server and rarecodes.com was started in 2003 as the code site mentioned earlier (what kind of a name for a hosting service is that anyways?). Though he swears up and down he sent samples, none of the sites he claims to have sent them to have responded saying they have them. He even backed out of a potentially very profitable deal with retailer Divineo. His chip's supposed UI screenshot showed 'save game' and 'load game' buttons, but what game are you saving from the UI of a modchip? Also there's a lock/unlock HDD button, but you can rest assured that the 360's HDD isn't locked like the original Xbox's was - so that UI was only extremely fake. To make a long story very short, this guy SkyD has just been outed big time and this is probably just the beginning of the information being dug up on him and his fake mod team.

Now, if this chip isn't real, when are we going to see some real ones? Well, Xbox modding team Xecuter says in their newest news post that "there will be more than one type of mod available from different groups in the coming weeks/months." My personal view is that softmods will come first and the first hardmods will be horrible looking monstrosities that are even harder to install then those freaking PS2 chips are. It's been said time and again by me and many others that MS's hardware approach this time has been pretty solid. Last generation they were stuck with pretty much OEM PC parts and had to piece together a protection scheme. Now don't get me wrong, nothing's unhackable, but MS had lots of good ideas put into this machine with the hypervisor and non-executable stack, etc. With the original Xbox, hardmods unlocked the ability to find, analyze, and modify the code that needed to be used for softmods. MS probably figured that the same approach would be taken this time, but it doesn't have to be - this time we can start with MS's other problems like the kiosk disc and running third party apps the Windows MCE. It's just like the old 'closes the door and opens the window' addage - we're going to get in, one way or another, no matter how long it takes. My personal prediction is some sort of mod by July of this year with a chip by this time next year. Until then, we'll just be coding Flash apps and decrypting what little bit of code we can.

Game Hack ON!
-Matt

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Update 1
Many many thanks to Ustler and Fusion for making their way to our little corner of the 'net to leave us some comments. Just picking out a few facts from their comments, we now know that SkyD has been around for about four years doing this crap. Fusion tells us about his lies within the Socom cheating scene, even going as far as to say he helped SOE write the anti-cheating code for Socom 2 and 3. Also, Fusion points out that he can and will help anyone who has been scammed by this jerk. If you drop Andy or me a line, we'll make sure to get you in touch with Fusion for his help. Ustler was also nice enough to confirm our suspicions of the UI being just a rip off of an Xbox utility skin - it was actually just a slightly modified Mimesis skin, and SkyD even had the balls to ask CLuis from the Mimesis team how to modify the template. More tales of SkyD have been told over IRC, also, according to Ustler. Apparently SkyD even lies to more retailers by telling them he is working on a CD and that he "nailed MS protection" but wanted to keep it quiet so asked the retailer to lie and say that 'Team I.C.E.' got the protection fron an anonymous source. You know someone is running low on credibility when something sounds more credible from an anonymous source than the actual 'team'.