The PlayStation Classic launched on Dec. 3 complete with 20 games to play, but it wasn't all good news. Not only was there some disappointment over the game choices Sony made, but nine of the titles are slower PAL versions. But there's another (positive?) quirk to the Classic: it's really easy to hack.

As ArsTechnica reports, Sony seems to have completely overlooked security on its mini PlayStation which has resulted in hackers managing to open up the system within the first week of it being on sale. Two console hackers going by the names yifanlu and madmonkey1907 managed to dump the Classic's code thanks to the serial port on the machine. What made their job easy after that was the discovery Sony signed and encrypted the Classic using a key that's also present on the system!

It gets worse for Sony and better for hackers because Sony also didn't implement a signature check on the bootrom code. The knock-on effect of that being it's already possible to execute code from a USB stick plugged into the PlayStation Classic. As you've probably guessed, PlayStation games other than the 20 Sony shipped with the machine can be run from a USB stick because of this security oversight.

It's still early days and attempting to run other games can result in your PlayStation Classic being bricked. However, we're only a week on from the launch. Give it a couple of months and it seems likely a set of tools will appear that work on any regional variation of the Classic and open it up completely without need for hardware modification. And unlike the PS4 and the PS3 before it, Sony can't really do anything about this because there's no way to force firmware updates to close the security holes.

If you own a PlayStation Classic and would love run more games on it, be patient and catch up on some PS4 classics to help pass the time during the holidays. The hackers are hard at work and it shouldn't take them long to completely own the system. This could turn out to be a bit of a nightmare for Sony.