Neowin.net

EA Games will release a stand-alone demo for Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead, the new expansion pack for the highly acclaimed WWII action PC game, Medal of Honor Allied Assault. The demo will be available on Friday, November 8, 2002 from the official Medal of Honor Allied Assault website at http://www.mohaa.ea.com/

The downloadable demo will feature Malta, a multiplayer level exclusive to the demo and not included in the full version of the game. The demo will also include new skins for British, Russian, American and German troops as well as unveiling some of the new weapons!

Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead for the PC will begin shipping on Tuesday, November 12, 2002.

News source: EA
Screenshot: Allied Assault™ Spearhead

In most situations, the attacker would already need to be on a computer connected to the network to execute an attack. However, if the router has a 'remote management' feature enabled, a malicious hacker could execute an attack from anywhere on the Internet by entering the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the router along with the name of the script into his or her Web browser.

"An attacker could just scan a (network) subnet for IP addresses belonging to Linksys routers. Once they identified the targeted routers, they could bring them down just using their Web browser," said Sunil James, a senior security engineer at iDefense, which is in Chantilly, Virginia.

The vulnerability affects BEFSR41 routers using a version of the router firmware earlier than version 1.42.7.

Other Linksys models including the BEFSR11 and BEFSRU31 routers may also be affected by the vulnerability, according to James. Those models use the same embedded Web server and firmware software as the BEFSR41, James said.

IDefense has not tested the vulnerability on the BEFSR11 or BEFSRU31 router hardware, James said. Aside from losing Internet connectivity, however, James said that iDefense does not believe the vulnerability would allow attackers to place or execute malicious code on an affected network. Following an attack, users would need to reset the router by pressing a reset button on the back of the device to restore it, according to iDefense.

To guard against this vulnerability, iDefense recommends upgrading the router firmware to version 1.42.7 or later (http://www.linksys.com/download/firmware.asp). That and subsequent firmware versions appear to eliminate the vulnerability, though Linksys makes no mention of the vulnerability in the release notes that accompany the updated firmware, according to James.

Users are also asked to verify that the router's remote management feature is not enabled.

Denial of service (DOS) attacks are usually associated with coordinated efforts by one or more hackers against high-visibility corporate Web sites such as eBay Inc. and Microsoft Corp. However, the growing popularity of broadband Internet connections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia have made small office and home-based computer networks -- and attacks that target those networks -- common.

A study in 2001 by researchers from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the San Diego Supercomputer Center found that a significant percentage of more than 12,000 DOS attacks the group studied were against home users with broadband Internet connections. Researchers theorized that personal vendettas may have been the motivation for many of those attacks.