And given how scarce PS4s seem to be these days due to the pandemic, I imagine at least some people will be more hesitant to potentially wreck their PS4's ability to go online than in the past. So while I'd believe that a firmware exploit like this MIGHT potentially open the door for cheaters, I think it's far more likely that Sony will have countermeasures to prevent online cheating that will be extremely aggressive. Vita is not nearly as bad in this department, but it's the Vita very few people at Sony care anymore. And that's a console Sony basically considers dead at this point, dead enough that they were going to close its storefront earlier this year. CTurt had initially announced he would reverse engineer the graphics library on the PS4 in order to run his homebrew loader. With a gameboy emulator released just a few days after these statements, he’s making progress fast, it seems. The advice in the scene remains the same: going online with CFW is a risk regardless of what precautions you take, and the only way to be safe is to never go online with a CFW PS3. He then released a simple pong game for the PS4, and also announced he was working on a homebrew loader.
There are methods that can spoof the analytics Sony looks at to determine whether your PS3 is running unmodified or not, but it's not like hackers know the full list of everything Sony's going to examine, or how to spoof it correctly. The costs to the user are severe at minimum your console ID gets banned so it can never go online again regardless of what account you try to log in with, and I think they'll also ban your account as well (so goodbye all your digital games). Having looked into PS3 CFW to dump games for use in RPCS3, Sony even now can and apparently does aggressively block PS3s with CFW if they spot them connecting to PSN. PS4 Firmware Update 1.76: While everyone is eagerly awaiting the release of PlayStation 4 firmware update 2.00 this fall, Sony brought out PS4 firmware update 1.