Welcome to part 3 of the Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor blog series. In this part I’ll go over what happened after I released the PoC for Bad Update, and how it went from taking ~20 minutes with a ~30% success rate to being near instantaneous with a near 100% success rate. If you haven’t already I highly recommend you read (or at least skim through) part 1 and part 2 as this post will reference a lot of the material discussed there. This part will be very short but will catch you up for part 4 which covers the peer pressure exploit and will be out soon.
In the months following the release of Bad Update v1.0 there were two major improvements made to it by others. The first by “ihatecompvir” and “InvoxiPlayGames” is a new game save entry point in the demo version of Rock Band Blitz (RBB) called DaTArrest. The demo version of RBB is a package file that’s normally downloaded from the Xbox Live store for free and saved to your console’s HDD or memory unit. When the Xbox 360 got support for using USB sticks as storage devices all of the packages signed to boot from the HDD or memory unit were grandfathered in to also boot from USB storage devices. This means the RBB demo package can be copied to a USB stick as a normal file and launched on any console on a software version that supports it.
