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. Davey thought it notable that the Microsoft server initially made no mention of the ASP problems. The machine is running a beta, or test version, of Windows 2000, on a Pentium III chip with 256 MB of memory.