Nintendo Switch piracy website NSw2u has been taken offline following a mid-July seizure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has thus taken out one of the largest hosts of illegal Switch ROMs on the internet, which has been operational for nearly five years.
While most modern consoles tend to resist piracy for years after release, the Switch was hacked unusually quickly. Its first public jailbreak became possible due to a hardware vulnerability in the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip, discovered within less than a year of its March 2017 release. After the flaw was publicized in April 2018, groups like Team Xecuter began releasing custom firmware that allowed users to rip ROMs and play pirated games. The fact that the Tegra X1 was a widely documented chip even before the Switch's release also accelerated the development of emulators, further contributing to the rapid development of Switch piracy efforts. As the scene matured in the years that followed, countless websites dedicated to illegally distributing Switch ROMs have emerged.
New information has come to light on how Nintendo hunted down one particular Switch pirate that had allegedly been selling numerous pirated games.
One of the largest...
