main

Pay $19.95 to see World Cup highlights on the internet

me101   on 29 April 2002 - 13:40 · 7 comments & 142 views

Advertisement (Why?)
Fans around the world will be able to watch World Cup highlights on the internet for the first time, internet company Yahoo! said on Monday.

Yahoo!, KirchSport of Germany and FIFA, world soccer's governing body, have reached agreement on showing highlights of all 64 matches at the World Cup in South Korea and Japan between May 31 and June 30.

And there is always a BUT... It's gonna cost you $19.95 fee to log on to the service.

Given the significant time difference between South Korea, Japan, Europe and the Americas, record numbers of fans are expected to visit FIFAworldcup.com at all hours of the day.

The service will provide:
  • Four minutes of professionally-produced video highlights available around three hours after the final game of the day has finished
  • Highlights enabling fans the ability to find their favorite moments, such as all the goals by their favorite team
  • Commentaries in six languages -- English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and German
  • Exclusive video screensavers and vintage World Cup TV and film footage, telling the story of the last 10 World Cups.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter added: "This is an important agreement which ushers in a new era in communication and allows football fans greater choice, giving them the ability to access the event and enjoy the action, wherever they are in the world.

News source: Reuters


unlike previous exploits that went unanswered this one saw a prompt response:

Vendor response:
Finjan Malicious Code Research Center had an interesting discussion with Microsoft Security Response Center. This is their response:

Hi, Thanks very much for your note and for sending this on. We really appreciate it. To understand the issue fully, it would be good to expand this somewhat. There really are two issues here: One related to the ability to mount an attack successfully, and one related to how data is stored on a system and what could happen to that in light of a successful attack. To be clear, none of the attack scenarios that you've described are mounted through MBSA itself. Also, the attack you've described does not exploit a vulnerability in any product: in a default system this attack fails. It's only when a user chooses to run code from an untrusted source and proceed despite the security warnings provided that this attack could succeed. Protecting systems against untrusted code is vitally important, and we call this out in our 10 Immutable Laws of Security as Law #1 ( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/columns/security/10imlaws.asp ), to underscore its importance. If an attacker were able to convince a user to run their code, that code would then be able to take any actions on the system that the user can take. While it is true that MBSA stores its information in a known location, storing it in an unpredictable location would not measurably change the situation. An attacker's code could just as easily search the local system for the file. Likewise, it is true that MBSA's information can be read by the user (or code running as the user). However, even if the MBSA information were not present on the system, code running as the user would be able to determine the presence or absence of patches, simply by consulting the time/date information contained in the publicly available MSSecure XML database. Again, it is a question of degree rather than feasibility. The larger issue in both cases is the presence of code running with the user's privileges. If the attacker cannot run code, it does not matter how the MBSA data is stored, because the attacker cannot access it. If the attacker can run code, he or she does not need the MBSA data, as they already have all the privileges needed to duplicate the MBSA processing. (For that matter, the attacker could simply run MBSA itself and do a "screen scrape"). That said, we are always looking to make improvements and we appreciate concerns and feedback like this. Our MBSA team is looking at these suggestions along with others that we have received and consider them as they design future versions of this tool.
Thanks again for sending this on, we really appreciate it.
Regards,
secure@microsoft.com

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 7 additional comments

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Advertisement (Why?)