The Vole has been touting the security features of the Xbox 360 of late, claiming that unlike previous consoles, the Xbox 360 will take a very long time to be able to modify.
In the past consoles have been modded to allow for piracy of games on the platform, and later as consoles began springing hard drives and PC-like features they became platforms for music, movie, TV and games piracy.
However Microsoft engineer Chris Satchell told government TV station the BBC that the Xbox 360 will be a lot harder to hack than previous generations of consoles, touting the fact that the Xbox 360 has been built from the ground up by Microsoft, allowing for much greater security.
“We’ve taken security to the hardware level and built it in from the ground up,” he said. “One of the reasons we went with custom hardware design for all our silicon is that it allows us to build security at the silicon level. There are going to be levels of security in this box that the hacker community has never seen before.”
This means that hackers will have a much tougher time in turning Microsoft’s new media hub into a piracy hub in the living room, though Satchell does admit that eventually even the fabled security of the Xbox 360 will probably be cracked.
“There are some really bright people in the world with some really expensive hardware,” he said. “I’m sure sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security. But the way we have done the design doesn’t mean that it will work on somebody else’s machine.”
If Microsoft’s security measures can hold off crackers from Xbox 360 games for even a few months then the software manufacturers of at least the first waves of games for the console will be happy.