Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create a fake game controller.
Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create a fake game controller.
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IOActive finds hackers have compromised some game controllers

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

The makers of official licensed game controllers were once pretty good at stopping the clone makers from creating fake controllers. But security research firm IOActive has found that this may not be the case anymore.

The makers of video game consoles often use cryptographic mechanisms to vendor-lock their accessories so third parties can’t duplicate these accessories — like game controllers — with impunity. The third parties want to break these mechanisms to sell compatible accessories, said Andrew Zonenberg, principal security consulting at IOActive in an interview with GamesBeat.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.