US Navy paying for hacking attempts on foreign consoles

The United States Navy has confirmed that they are looking into methods in which to monitor and hack into used gaming consoles to find sensitive data that could harm US citizens. The new project has the Navy working with a California-based company, Obscure Technologies, to develop a system in which they can monitor multiple platforms at once, specifically six new consoles currently available.

"This project involves furnishing video game systems, both new and used, and creating prototype rigs for capturing data from the video game systems," said the Navy in a statement.

Their partner, Obscure Technologies, also confirmed the exercise, saying that the contract has them doing an "R & D effort for the development and delivery of computer forensic tools for analyzing network traffic and stored data created during the use of video game systems."

This technology will only be used on foreign nationals, as US law protects citizens from such monitoring. The contract, valued at just over $177,000, will provide a monitoring solution for six consoles so that clear, clean data can be extracted. The job will create a rig specifically designed to handle new consoles coming online as well.

Obscure is not necessarily green at this kind of work, as one of their leading researchers was responsible for "having previously reverse engineered the Microsoft Xbox."

[via ZDNet]