After the Xbox 360 kiosk demodisc already proved to be less than completely secure the hacking community scored another few hits this weekend according to an article on Joystiq.

The hackers claim they have achieved the following:

• Successfully ripping Hexic off of a kiosk disc and executing it in a PC browser.
• Successfully modifying Hexic and running it on an Xbox 360 connected to Xbox Live.
• Hacking Hexic to earn several of the achievements without doing any of the work.
• Successfully running simple Flash applications that were never on the Xbox 360 (such as a clock application).
• Modifying certain aspects of the King Kong kiosk demo to create the simple program pictured here.

To the casual user especially the third one is worrying, as it opens the door to cheaters granting themselves achievements and as such gamer points without doing the actual work for it. It seems Microsoft has already reset the Hexic leaderboards on Xbox Live after gamers got immense scores, although Major Nelson hints that something else is the reason (also see update below). To the hackers some of these items are major steps on the road to running home-brewn code and eventually copied discs on the system.

King Kong was also the target of a smart hacker in the xboxhacker.net forums. As you can see on the photo to the right he succeeded in replacing some of the game’s shaders to render all-yellow results instead of the usual gloomy King Kong world. At the moment nothing more than something to create funny or more frequently ugly graphics, this opens new routes for the hackers to explore as they may be able to abuse the GPU and the system’s unified memory to hack into system memory through malicious shader code.

All in all a lot of progress has been made on the hacking front, but the grand prize of actually running custom code is still out of reach.

Update: Major Nelson added a disclaimer that the leaderboards and stats problems are not related to any security issues.