“All Switch units in existence today are vulnerable, forever,” claim system hackers. A few months ago developer Kate Temkin and others at ReSwitched worked to prove and document the exploit, disclosing it to Nvidia, Nintendo and others. TechCrunch reports that the exploit was independently and separately publicly noted by fail0verflow in early January.

The flaw is described as unpatchable, as it is inside the boot and power management ROM of the Nvidia Tegra X1 used in the Switch. Users only need to initiate recovery mode on the console and the exploit can be triggered via a malformed packet sent during a routine USB device status check. Thence up to 65,535 bytes of extra data can be executed without question.