Do you think that's an inflammatory enough title? I really think this is how the press should be handling information like the notification of this morning's net slowdown due to lax security on MS SQL servers net-wide.

Discovered in July of 2002, Microsoft did provide a patch to this error, recognized at the time as "Critical", so much of the onus is on the administrators who didn't apply the patches and secure their networks. However, people need to read this stuff, so more inflammatory headlines are necessary.

Last night, I received my first indications that this was going on when AboveNet (my former hosting provider that still thinks I'm a customer) sent out an alert to all technical contacts about a new flaw in MS-SQL that was being use to gain access to systems illegally.

This morning, I a friend who is plugged in to Matrix Net Systems, told me that he'd received a notification about huge traffic congestion and reachability problems starting at about 4:30GMT (a little before the alert from AboveNet).

And by the time I got back from a work-out this AM, CNN had picked it up in this article.