Still more security holes have been found in Microsoft products, the latest two center on Micrsoft's SQL server. As CNN reports it, the first one leads to the now familiar buffer overflow problem which, in turn, allows hackers access to the server. The second hole can cause 'Denial of Service' attack. From CNN:
The security problems affect SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7.0 and are related to the way these two versions of the product create and display text messages after a query is submitted, the company said in a security bulletin. Microsoft labeled the risk from the first flaw as "moderate" and from the second flaw as "low."
There are patches available for both holes from Microsoft.
The Mac Observer Spin:
Comments about Microsoft's security problems are pointless because anything worth saying has already been said, but this does point to something that should concern Mac users. There are a lot of people poking at Microsoft products looking for, and finding, security holes. This is actually a good thing for Microsoft because, once found, the holes can be fixed and the product is made that much more secure. While Mac OS X benefits from the years and years of general UNIX testing and use, Apple's implementation of BSD may not live up to the promise of security that UNIX typically offers. The only to know whether Mac OS X is secure or not is to have it tested pretty much the way the many versions of Windows are being tested. Holes do exist in UNIX, as proven in a security alert this past November, so it is possible that our favorite computer is as vulnerable to the kinds of attacks Microsoft's products are vulnerable to, but our added problem is that we don't know about them yet.