Neowin.net

UK DISTRIBUTORS OF AMD CHIPS have been told not to expect the Athlon XP2600+ with the 333MHz frontside bus before mid November at the earliest. "With the way its going with AMD at the moment," said one frustrated distie, "all I can tell you with complete confidence is that it won’t be before then…"

The biggest number seen on chips from AMD at the moment is 2200+ and only one in three distributors has this chip in any volume.

"The situation with AMD at the moment is that they've been extremely slow in getting stuff through," said one salesman, unaware he was talking to The INQUIRER. "We get ETAs for "this week" that shift to 'next week'. They come and go. At the moment your guess is as good as mine", he said. Although, admittedly, our guess proved to be worse, since our whisper of a delivery date of yesterday fell well short of the mark.

Our man from a major UK distributor told us he had over 1000 XP2600+ chips on back order and said there was every chance we may have some in the next couple of weeks."

One of the three distributors we called said an AMD product manager gave a delivery date of between the middle and the end of November. Others had been given no guidance. "I expect they’ll be here by Christmas," said one. X-Bit Labs says there will no official announcement of the 2600+ with the 333MHz FSB from AMD. Instead the comany will just skip them out when it's good and ready.

News source: The Inq

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.