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Such actions are frowned upon by the hardware manufacturers. In July last year, Sony won a court case to ban the selling of mod chips for its PlayStation 2 in the UK.

In July of this year, a 22-year-old man became the first person in the UK to be convicted for modifying a video games console.

With the 360, Microsoft is aiming to make it as hard as possible to hack.

"We've taken security to the hardware level and built it in from the ground up," said Chris Satchell from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group.

"One of the reasons we went with custom hardware design for all our silicon is that it allows us to build security at the silicon level," he told the BBC News website.

"There are going to be levels of security in this box that the hacker community has never seen before."

Part of the motivation behind this is to prevent people from using the 360 to watch pirated films or TV shows.

But Mr Satchell admitted no system was fool-proof and that, with enough time and dedication, the security on the Xbox 360 would be broken.

"There're some really bright people in the world with some really expensive hardware," he said.

"I'm sure sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security. But the way we have done the design doesn't mean that it will work on somebody else's machine."

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