A Trojan is now out to brick your DS, too

by Dan Choi { Oct 10th 2005 at 8:30AM }

A brick concerning good education For DS owners beginning to feel left out by that PSP Trojan circulating online right now, a hacker by the name of DarkFader has managed to bring that brick-making goodness to Nintendo's previously protected portable as well.

So unless you want a $130 brick on your hands, try to avoid anything by the likes of r0mloader (supposedly named that way to combat piracy) or taihen (which was said to be a hentai-filled ROM). This little Trojan homebrew will reportedly wreck your DS (unless you preemptively ran FlashMe) and "affect your GBAMP firmware and/or your SuperCard Firmware," too.

Remember, kiddies: handheld firmware is a terrible thing to waste, so play safe, and homebrew with your head. Here's a similar link from Engadget.

[Thanks, anonymous, Covarr, JonathanEx, and Nico]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Oshi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

Yeah that put a lot of noobs off about homebrewing on the DS since the guy who made the trojan was a well-respected coder in the scene. Some people are just jerks I guess.

Christopher7xii @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

Probably got paid off by someone to do so if he is well known through out the scene. Kind of funny if you ask me. All the DS fans were "hahaha PSP sux0r u got virii!!! DS is imoon cuz U cant change firmw@rZzz"

Besides, only dirty perverts watch hentai. Serves 'em right.

Kevin @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

"Taihen" is japanese for "Awful". TEH CODER HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR?????

John @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

HAHAHAHA

DS owners cant make fun of PSP owners anymore.

They got a virus too :D

Eric @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

I tracked down a transcript from IRC channel where this was originally "announced"... Google "DarkFader virus" to find it. The news post is right, DarkFader designed it to hurt the people trying to play commercial roms on the DS. The homebrew scene has always been rabidly against piracy... seems he's taken it to an extreme though.

JohnDeMe @ Dec 18th 2005 9:36PM

Did he say that it was for anti-piracy reasons? Sure, but that doesn't mean some kidiot is going to rip the function and start submitting trojanized-versions of already-existing homebrew. This is made even easier for the homebrew where the author(s) were nice enough to release source. Before anyone brings up "download only from mainstream sites" argument, how are the mainstream sites going to confirm that a newly submitted game doesn't contain a logic bomb with this payload? DarkFader did a lot of work with getting homebrew running on actual hardware and apparently that was all so he could remove all interest in it for concern that you'll kill your system. Even if FlashMe-ing your DS may let you recover, who's to say that he won't decide to release a BIOS with the next revision of FlashMe that contains the code to wipe the flash? This is about the equivalent of a person in a programming forum saying "this one time I put a backdoor in a program and got my friend's email password". Would you trust anything that person releases after that or, for that matter, anything they released previously that hasn't been throughly examined?

As a previous commenter said, have a look at the IRC log and you can get a good idea of the maturity level of some of some of the people in the community. Making a system inoperable isn't really a challenge, but simple things amuse simple minds.

elmer @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7086&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

Read Chisms comments, and on the next page Darkfader himself. Notice all the most negative posters have the fewest previous posts.

Sean O. @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

The DS can still make fun of the PSP on account of games...

Falsoman @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

First of all, it's belived to be a prank, but even if there is a DS trojan only pros can run it since to actually have access to update the DS firmware by yourself you need to have wiFi me or a PassKey and a GBA flash kart... and even so you HAVE to open the baterry case of your DS and put a metal spike or something like that to make the firmware writable, then you should keep pressing that thing while you put the malware on the GBA flash kart and use the passkey or wifime to run it... so it's kinda hard for a noob to do any harm with a virus of this kind.

Cyberclaws @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

It's a 'hoax'? It's really hard to do even if you tried to? Aw shucks! I thought I was gonna be a proud owner of a 100+ dollar brick. Oh well, I guess I will just have to go out and spend 250+ dollars if I want to have an expensive brick then. =(

JohnDeMe @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

> even if there is a DS trojan only pros can run it since to actually have access to update the DS firmware by yourself you need to have wiFi me or a PassKey and a GBA flash kart...

In other words, you need a DS that can run homebrew software. That is exactly why it is something that would be affecting people that use homebrew. If you don't dev or run homebrew software you wouldn't be concerned about it in the first place.

> and even so you HAVE to open the baterry case of your DS and put a metal spike or something like that to make the firmware writable, then you should keep pressing that thing while you put the malware on the GBA flash kart and use the passkey or wifime to run it... so it's kinda hard for a noob to do any harm with a virus of this kind.

You short the leads to overwrite a certain part of the flash, the leads don't have to be shorted for the flasher to work, though. That's why DS systems with non-standard Firmware (FlashMe) aren't affected... they bridge the gap and a bit of "recovery" code is written to the part of memory that is protected when the leads aren't shorted.

How does an involved process mean that someone isn't going to do damage with this release? The most technically inept person in the world that can share or email the rom image with a person that either does know how to mod their DS, has bought theirs pre-modded, or simply bought the parts and followed the STUPIDLY SIMPLE instructions can effectivly screw up as many systems as someone that knows a thing or two about the system's inner workings. Malicious intent and a means of exacting it are all you need. "Hey! This news story says that this will kill a person's Nintendo DS. HAHAHAHA. I'm going to post it to forums and people will be so pissed about not being able to use their system anymore."

It may have been released as "a cool way to fuck over warez kiddies", but that's not to say that it won't start circulating as "flashme3.0" or otherwise vindictive children will start circulating it out of anger for losing their own system's usage. When a site gets defaced, as homebrew pages have before, who's to say that you won't find official roms replaced with variants of this? In all fairness it would've been just as easy for someone to take an official version of the firmware flasher and inserting garbage in place of the actual image, but making something that is labelled as a DS firmware killer is just going to attract the people that are ignorant enough to be malicious for no apparent reason.

Ugly_Butt_Monkey @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

This is why I don't put downloads on my ds.

funtographer @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

"taihen" means "trouble"

Koda Kumi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

taihen-大変-very aweful, dreadful, or terrible
or
taihen-他意-ill will, malice, another intention, secret purpose, ulterior motive, fickleness, double mindedness.

It depends on how you use it in a sentence or write it. It doesn't matter, virus for any kind is bad.