14 DAY TRIAL // StarCraft Brood War has been disclosed to have a vulnerability that may cause a denial of service (DoS) attack. The flaw comes with the minimap preview and it has not been repaired by any patch. It's not such a big deal, but somebody could make you program crash (remotely) right in the middle of the game, which can be very annoying.
The application cannot handle exceptional conditions so if a hacker exploits this bug it can deny service to the user, no matter what he or she was doing in StarCraft at that time. This has been noticed in version 1.15.1 of Brood War, but prior versions may be affected as well, as SecurityFocus informs us.
Ah, but don't panic people, this vulnerability is not so critical - many of you have gotten used to Blizzard's downtime and have experienced a lot of problems on the Battlenet. If you have been playing StarCraft (or WoW or Diablo) for a long time, then you are already "battle hardened" when it comes to bugs, flaws, exploits and stuff like that, so a little denial of service isn't going to do much harm.
When I first played this great game I was using Windows 98 SE - there was no need for hackers back then, as the program or the whole OS would crash by themselves, so don't be alarmed, this vulnerability needs to be exploited in order for anything to happen.
If you want to, you can visit the official Brood War website, by clicking on this link and see what or if Blizzard has anything to say about this. You can find links to the technical support area and to the forums on the linked page. In any case, I haven't seen any news about this being fixed, but I have seen something about the new StarrCraft II that we all have been expecting.