It took him five weeks, but the man once famous for hacking Apple’s iPhone when he was a teenager has now hacked the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console, BBC News reports.

Playstation 3 has been on the market for 3 years, but has been previously thought unhackable. But George Hotz was not easily scared off the case. Much as he’d done when he cracked the iPhone code, Hotz let his curiosity drive him to analyze the console for 3 weeks, and spend another 2 hacking what he described as a “very secure system”.

“It’s supposed to be unhackable – but nothing is unhackable,” Hotz told BBC News. “I can now do whatever I want with the system. It’s like I’ve got an awesome new power – I’m just not sure how to wield it.”

In hacking the machine he had to alter both hardware and software, taking the sleek console and turning it into a mess of technological guts; a tangle of bare chips and wires deconstructed to suit his needs. The crude transformation was all part of the plan. “You can use hardware to inject an insecurity and then you can build on that,” Hotz explained.

Hotz is now working to refine his hack before he publishes the details on the Internet. He is expected to make public what he’s learned about the system’s “root key”, the master security code other hackers could use to perform their own experiments.

While Hotz was motivated by a desire to understand the inner workings of the Playstations 3, others may not have so pure motives. Hotz admitted that his work could lead to users hacking the console to play pirated games but said, “I’m not going to personally have anything to do with that.”

This comes as no surprise since Hotz also admitted he’s never been a fan of the Playstation 3, owning only one game he rarely played.

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