PS3HEN Questions about PS3Hen risks to my account

[Valken471]

Hi there, I apologise in advance as I realise this has probably been asked a thousand times before, but I was wanting to know about the risk of being banned for installing PS3Hen on my PS3 Super Slim? The intent is to not sign into PSN and to stay offline entirely if at all possible, would I still be at risk of a ban for doing so? Additionally, this PS3 has my main PSN account on, would simply signing out of my PSN account avoid the potential of a ban?

I had one friend suggest formatting the drive and starting fresh on the PS3 as well, would this help any or would there still be some record of the account credentials? I know these questions may seem silly but I've invested a lot of money into my PSN account over the years across PS3, PS4 and now PS5 and I'd rather not take any risks with it, especially if I'm not planning on using any PSN features on said PS3. If you can give me any relevant information and the like, I'd greatly appreciate it as having more features on my PS3 would be nice but as I said, I'm not prepared to do so without being able to mitigate risk substantially. Thank you very much for your time!

 

[bguerville]

Hi there, I apologise in advance as I realise this has probably been asked a thousand times before, but I was wanting to know about the risk of being banned for installing PS3Hen on my PS3 Super Slim? The intent is to not sign into PSN and to stay offline entirely if at all possible, would I still be at risk of a ban for doing so? Additionally, this PS3 has my main PSN account on, would simply signing out of my PSN account avoid the potential of a ban?

I had one friend suggest formatting the drive and starting fresh on the PS3 as well, would this help any or would there still be some record of the account credentials? I know these questions may seem silly but I've invested a lot of money into my PSN account over the years across PS3, PS4 and now PS5 and I'd rather not take any risks with it, especially if I'm not planning on using any PSN features on said PS3. If you can give me any relevant information and the like, I'd greatly appreciate it as having more features on my PS3 would be nice but as I said, I'm not prepared to do so without being able to mitigate risk substantially. Thank you very much for your time!

1. We have no stats, no data to rely on, only a number of subjective ban reports out of which it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions.

2. Safe does not exist when it comes to using PSN services with a modified system firmware. It's a breach of the TCs you agreed to & the detection of any modification can automatically lead to a ban, in theory anyway. Consequently, all you can do is minimize the risks when using a modified system or stick to using OFW & no modifications whatsoever.

3. With the information we have, it would appear that the majority of bans are related to online gaming with a handful of game titles such as GTA5, BO2, COD.., those bans are usually requested by game server admins, often because they detected game mods, game cheats or custom syscalls.
S#ny doesn't seem to bother that much with bans, not anymore anyway, although certain practices might lead them to issue a ban, stuff like spoofing to use PSN or messing with synced trophies should not be done casually.

4. Regarding HEN specifically, the underlying system firmware is HFW 4.88 which is basically OFW 4.88, so when HEN is installed, as long as the HEN payload is not enabled, using PSN should be quite safe overall, some things like the installed files (through the official ps3xploit pkg or 3rd party setups), temporary files or history files could in theory be used to detect that HEN has been used at some point on the console but in practice nobody seems to bother with that kind of stuff.
Of course if you enable HEN & use PSN at the same time, it's another story altogether & the risk would rise to a level similar to CFW, in fact a setup where HEN gets enabled automatically after boot would be as risky to use with PSN as CFW.

5. Keep in mind that there are only 2 things at risk when facing a ban, the console idps & the PSN account of the currently used ps3 user profile.
The console idps is a central piece of data in the ps3 os, having to replace it is a pain but it can be done whereas you cannot replace a PSN account without losing every game you bought with it, trophies you earned etc.

 

[Valken471]

1. We have no stats, no data to rely on, only a number of subjective ban reports out of which it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions.

2. Safe does not exist when it comes to using PSN services with a modified system firmware. It's a breach of the TCs you agreed to & the detection of any modification can automatically lead to a ban, in theory anyway. Consequently, all you can do is minimize the risks when using a modified system or stick to using OFW & no modifications whatsoever.

3. With the information we have, it would appear that the majority of bans are related to online gaming with a handful of game titles such as GTA5, BO2, COD.., those bans are usually requested by game server admins, often because they detected game mods, game cheats or custom syscalls.
S#ny doesn't seem to bother that much with bans, not anymore anyway, although certain practices might lead them to issue a ban, stuff like spoofing to use PSN or messing with synced trophies should not be done casually.

4. Regarding HEN specifically, the underlying system firmware is HFW 4.88 which is basically OFW 4.88, so when HEN is installed, as long as the HEN payload is not enabled, using PSN should be quite safe overall, some things like the installed files (through the official ps3xploit pkg or 3rd party setups), temporary files or history files could in theory be used to detect that HEN has been used at some point on the console but in practice nobody seems to bother with that kind of stuff.
Of course if you enable HEN & use PSN at the same time, it's another story altogether & the risk would rise to a level similar to CFW, in fact a setup where HEN gets enabled automatically after boot would be as risky to use with PSN as CFW.

5. Keep in mind that there are only 2 things at risk when facing a ban, the console idps & the PSN account of the currently used ps3 user profile.
The console idps is a central piece of data in the ps3 os, having to replace it is a pain but it can be done whereas you cannot replace a PSN account without losing every game you bought with it, trophies you earned etc.

I see, that information is very useful, thank you very much! So could I assume that as long as my main PSN account is not actively signed in, the risks of said PSN account being banned are minimal? As I said I have a super slim model so I believe HEN is my only option when it comes to homebrewing. I would also most likely just disconnect my PS3 from the internet as the majority of games I would play are not ones that would see regular updates anyhow, would that be safe to do? I fully understand that nothing is fully safe but as I said, I want to mitigate the risk as much as possible.

As for the reformatting the drive/factory resetting, would this do anything to help or would it just be pointless and excessive? My thinking was there'd be some record of my account left over on the drive that could be picked up, but I think I may just be overthinking that, but this isn't really my area of expertise so I felt it best to ask.

Thank you very much for your time once again, I greatly appreciate the information.

 

[bguerville]

I see, that information is very useful, thank you very much! So could I assume that as long as my main PSN account is not actively signed in, the risks of said PSN account being banned are minimal? As I said I have a super slim model so I believe HEN is my only option when it comes to homebrewing. I would also most likely just disconnect my PS3 from the internet as the majority of games I would play are not ones that would see regular updates anyhow, would that be safe to do? I fully understand that nothing is fully safe but as I said, I want to mitigate the risk as much as possible.

As for the reformatting the drive/factory resetting, would this do anything to help or would it just be pointless and excessive? My thinking was there'd be some record of my account left over on the drive that could be picked up, but I think I may just be overthinking that, but this isn't really my area of expertise so I felt it best to ask.

Thank you very much for your time once again, I greatly appreciate the information.

You don't need to disconnect the Internet & updating apps or games is 100% safe.
Only deliberate PSN connection for online gaming, console activation, trophy syncing & PSN shopping can be risky. Always keep the auto login to PSN feature for your user profile off.

Reformatting the hard drive should never really be necessary & using that as a mean to protect from bans is not realistic anyway, you cannot reinstall everything everytime you use PSN.

The most likely things to get detected are custom syscalls in general & game mods/cheats when online gaming & since 4.88 came out firmware version spoofing. If you avoid those things, keeping HEN disabled, when connecting/connected to PSN, using PSN should be "safe-ish".
People who avoid risky practices on CFW usually don't get banned & the risk factor when using PSN on HFW (without HEN enabled) should be close to 0 but there is never any guarantee & never will be.

If you use PSN frequently, my advice is to get everything you need from your main PSN account while on OFW then install HFW/HEN & use a disposable PSN account.
You can also spoof idps dynamically (with a spare obtained from a dead console, same model if possible) to protect the console's original idps whenever you connect to PSN although that would require enabling HEN & using wMM then disabling syscalls, not exactly ideal but feasible. Keeping in mind that idps spoofing is in itself just another mod, in theory it could also be detected & lead to a ban.

Alternatively, if you don't want to take any risks but use PSN frequently, you only have 2 options:
1. Buy a second console kept on OFW for online gaming.
2. Replace your superslim with a CFW compatible model & set up a dual boot system CFW/OFW.

Note:
If ever you have kids around & you fear that they may use PSN with HEN enabled, you might consider installing the ps3 lock plugin with your HEN installation (I have only tried it on CFW though, not on HEN so I cannot confirm that it works without issues).