Hacker Reports PS5 Exploit Found With AI to Sony and Collects $50,000

The PS5 hacking scene is in an uproar: a hacker who goes by “Jordy” reported a console vulnerability to Sony and received a $50,000 bounty for it. He says he found it using generative AI. According to IGN, the report led a well-known researcher to leave the scene, and left some players feeling they lost the chance to run Linux on their consoles.

IGN’s report includes no statement from Sony, and everything below is based on that report and on what the people involved said.

What was found and how it reached Sony

According to IGN, it is a hypervisor bug, a fault in the core software layer of the console, affecting firmware from 13.60 up to 14.00. A bug like this lets someone run kernel-level code, for example to boot Linux on a machine not designed for it.

Jordy reported it through HackerOne, a site where companies pay hackers to report flaws, and in return the flaws are kept quiet until they are patched. He told IGN he used generative AI to find the bug. As for why he reported it: “If I and another person can find it with LLM, so can someone else.”

The researcher who is leaving

Andy Nguyen, a Google security engineer known as theflow0, showed Linux running on the PS5 in March. After the report he said he is stepping away from the PS5 scene and stopping all work on PS5 Linux. He said plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027 are “all down the sink”, and that he had found the same bug a while ago.

According to Jordy, theflow0 found the bug back in 2025 and kept it secret. Jordy says the two initially agreed not to report it, but another researcher found the same bug soon after, which pushed him to report. We can’t verify who found it first: that claim comes only from Jordy and theflow0. IGN says it could not reach theflow0 for comment.

Where GTA 6 comes in

According to madwax0r, creator of the PS5 emulator tracker Kaishaku, theflow0 wanted researchers to wait until after November 19, GTA 6’s launch day. Playing the game requires the latest firmware, so if the bug had survived in the launch-day firmware, players could have updated, bought GTA 6 legitimately, and still booted Linux on the same console. Now that Sony can patch ahead of launch, people who want Linux must choose: keep the console offline, or update and give up Linux. Jordy, for his part, told IGN he doesn’t care about people being unable to pirate a game, and that his tweet about the payout was meant to provoke a reaction.

This isn’t an isolated story: IGN notes a wave of AI-assisted vulnerability finds this month, which people in the scene call “Black October”. We covered a similar claim about the Switch 2 here.

What gets me is that AI turned bug hunting into a race, and sitting quietly on a bug for a year is no longer realistic.

If you own a PS5, keep in mind that Sony has confirmed no fix, and that even the push to update before GTA 6 depends on what the company decides. Jailbreaking a console and running pirated games is illegal, and we don’t encourage it.