360 Dashboard update spells doom for Halo: Reach pirates

Microsoft released a dashboard update last night which added “boot to disc”  option and visuals tweaks to gamercard. However, it did more than what they announced.

The update also put up anti-piracy measures for XBLA’s two most popular online games, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach.

The update checks if the discs have AP 2.5 elements present or not. This is only present in retail discs and pirated version do not contain any such elements and MS will be able to detect the offenders and flag their Live ids for a future ban.

This will enable Microsoft to catch a huge number of pirates at once and we can expect severe action from their end soon.

However, reports suggests that hackers are hard at work at coming up with a counter-measure on their own in order to bypass this.

We’ll keep you updated.