[mohaa] "Spawn Hack" and server crashes

[Richard Harrison]

As a sort of aside I am a little but unsure my self on the whole "security
by obscurity" thing works for games. It seems that not publishing the
knowledge of the 'hack' gives the game manufacturers no incentive to bring
out a patch because the knowledge is not widespread. It is however within a
significant minority to cause pain for the general populous. If the
manufacturers are told before hand that there's a problem, here's how its
done, its repeatable and I am going to post it, then they would have to do
something. This is how the bugs are announced generally for such os's as
Windows. The manufacturers get a chance to fix it before the general public
get wind of how to do it. Why should games be different? I am monumentally
naive  about this?

Hazzie.
  -----Original Message-----
  From: [-SF-]Shockwave [mailto:shockwave at clanshortfuse.com]
  Sent: 03 November 2002 15:00
  To: mohaa at icculus.org
  Subject: Re: [mohaa] "Spawn Hack" and server crashes


  Hello again,

  It seems that there is now a fix out for this problem.  Here are the links
to the news item and the file itself:

  http://www.mohadmin.com/nuke/
  http://www.mohadmin.com/nuke/download/MoHAAPatch.zip

  The people involved in producing this patch still haven't responded to my
request for information about how this exploit works which is disappointing.
If anyone has any more information about this, I think it would be a good
idea to discuss it further.  The idea of compiling a new fgameded.so file
from a Windows installation using an unofficial patch program in order to
fix an unexplained server exploit makes me a bit uneasy.  Maybe it's just
me.


  Shockwave
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