Reflections on Technology and Society

(This article was originally published in 2003 by Secure Business Quarterly, a now-defunct publication.  Not having an original copy handy and not being able to refer people to the original site, I have retrieved a copy from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine ( dated 2006 in their archive ).  The text of the original article is reproduced here for convenience.) After the flames from Slammer's attack were doused and the technology industry caught up on its lost sleep, we started asking questions. Why did this happen? Could we have prevented it? What can we do to keep such a thing from happening again? These are questions we ask after every major security incident, of course. We quickly learned that the defect in SQL Server had been identified and patches prepared for various platforms more than six months before, so attention turned to system administrators. Further inquiry, however, shows that things are more complex. There were several com...