HP hit badly by SQL Slammer, claim sources

SOURCES SAID that Hewlett Packard's internal network, its intranet, was badly hit by the SQL Slammer worm with problems persisting inside the company even yesterday.

There's an internal investigation in train to discover just how this could happen to a firm like HP.

The rumour, said the sources, was that a large number of SQL Servers in the Intranet did not have the July 2002 patch of the Microsoft software in place.

But what's more interesting to us is that if the HP story is true, why didn't its administrators, and those at other large corporations such as American Express, have the SQL Servers safely behind a firewall?

The source claimed that even access to HP VMS systems was affected and only intermittently accessible. When we say access, we mean via X86 servers, naturally.

The attack affected servers all over the world and even affected ATM tills operated by the Bank of America.

Servers operated by Microsoft itself were also affected, as we reported over the weekend. µ