Neowin.net

Thanks MxxCon for this one.

PlanetSide is a Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Action game involving thousands of players fulfilling all the roles needed to wage war across the face of ten gigantic continents. The war will involve infantry, ground vehicles, and air battles in a science-fiction setting.

Important Information: The PlanetSide Beta is available to all FilePlanet Users. You will receive a unique key for the beta from FilePlanet during the installation of the beta. You will also need 512 MB RAM and 1 GB of virtual memory for the installation. To activate the beta, you will need to create a free Station.com account and complete the beta application form. The beta application will state that you may not be accepted, but you will get in the beta. Once these steps are complete, you will be able to enter the key.

News source: FilePlanet
View: Official website
View: Station.com account creation form
Download: PlanetSide Public Beta Client (1,366.5 Mb)

Microsoft has touted Passport as a technological centerpiece in the company's Web services future. Passport accounts are central repositories for a user's online data and can include personal information such as birthdays and credit card numbers as well as acting as the single key for the user's online accounts.

Microsoft moved quickly to prevent online vandals from exploiting the issue. The advisory was posted just before 8 p.m. PDT, and by 11:30 p.m., the software giant had essentially turned off the vulnerable feature. "We have shut down all ability to reset passwords," said Sean Sundwall, spokesman for the company.

The flaw allowed a single Web address--or URL--to be used to request a password reset from the Passport servers. The URL contains the e-mail address of the account to be changed and the address where the attacker would like to have the reset message sent. By entering the single line into a Web browser an attacker can cause the Passport servers to return a link that allows an account's password to be reset. By following the link returned in the message, the attacker can change the password for the victim's account.

Danka claims to have found the issue after a friend's account had been hacked.

"Later, my friend gave the 'attacker' my passport address as a challenge, and mine was compromised as well," he wrote in the e-mail. Not long after, he figured out how the attacker had compromised the accounts.

The security consultant also said that he had repeatedly sent e-mail warnings to Microsoft's abuse and security addresses at Hotmail.com to no avail. However, he didn't send an e-mail to Microsoft's standard security contact point, secure@microsoft.com.

It wasn't clear Wednesday night whether the flaw affected all Passport accounts, or a smaller subset of accounts. Several security experts confirmed that the flaw could be exploited in the manner described by Danka.

"I tried it on my own account and I tried it on my friends' accounts, with full permission; it worked on all occasions," said Wayne Chang, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "This is definitely a big security flaw."

The issue couldn't be confirmed by everyone. In some cases, security experts didn't get an e-mail back from the server.

"I just tried again, and have not yet received an e-mail with the change password link in it," Marc Slemko, a Seattle-area software engineer, wrote to CNET News.com in an e-mail. "That either means it is much slower now or has been disabled."

The engineer believed Microsoft would rally the security teams to handle the vulnerability, as the issue had enormous implications for customers.