So I got into the office this morning early to see why my servers were so slow in responding (if they responded at all)… after tracing things for about 45 minutes, I discovered that we had been hit by the Slammer virus/attack, which targets Microsoft SQL Server 2000. I didn’t realize we had a SQL Server on the outside of the firewall, but we do (apparently for a project another team is working on). I pulled it’s cable from the network card and whammo! Everything is back to normal, traffic-wise. Argh!

I figure there’s three reasons people target Microsoft products for attack: 1) Their products are full of security holes. 2) Their products are everywhere. 3) They’re hated primarily because of 1 and 2. These three things cause a pretty strong feedback loop.