Computer security is an increasingly important field as companies move more services to the Internet, often with publicly accessible Web sites that allow visitors to interact with corporate computers. Both sites declared victory. Shortly after the test site went up, the same server was taken down by a lightning storm , but Microsoft also acknowledged at the time that the guest book program had been compromised. Since the site was switched on a month ago, Microsoft has found and fixed four bugs in how the server handles Internet information, White said. An attacker crashed the machine August 17, Microsoft said.
More dangerous today are the software applications that reside on top of the operating system.
E-commerce has raised a host of new problems because it involves many applications, Klaus said. Most hackers simply go around it by going through the application layer. Web server software, Davey said. On the Microsoft site, the computer returned to normal once the access was shut down. Had they not shut us off, it would have killed their machine.