Shoutbox

The trojan can't spread thru the network you're connected on (at least that what I've read and remembered). Hence it is a trojan, not a virus.

(one of the mandatory characteristics of a virus is that it spreads)

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Firmware isn't like a standard piece of software which runs on top of an OS or something. Firmware controls the hardware directly and is written into the hardware directly; it is machine code. Without firmware (or faulty firmware) the hardware does absolutely nothing.

Firmware is directly written to chips (eeproms, flash-proms, whatever they're called); if those chips contain nothing they do not work anymore.

The possebility to upgrade/downgrade/etc is also controlled by this firmware. Hence the only thing you could do is replace the erased chips (and no store will do that, as you will have voided the warrenty).

You can compare "firmware" with the "BIOS" of a PC. Without the BIOS your PC is a big brick also. And you also wouldn't be able to start another program to update/fix your bios as the PC doesn't do anything more in the first place.

The only thing you could try is to replace the bioschip. But also know that such chips are often welded onto the board; they can't be replaced.

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The PSPBrick virus is extremely simple, it simply erases 3 "system files" (aka system code modules) which control the whole thing.

A virus (whether on a PC or console or on whatever) does actually nothing more then doing stuff which a normal decent program wouldn't do. A virus is nothing magical at all, it simply uses the available code for malicious practices...

I could write a program where the user is asked for a file to overwrite. Instead I could delete the routine which ask the user for a file, and simply start overwriting every file I find. The code would be not much different, however the result to the user would be very different...