Twenty years ago this month (next Wednesday to be exact), sysadmins and database administrators started noticing extremely high network traffic related to problems with their SQL Servers.
The SQL Slammer worm was infecting Microsoft SQL Servers.
Microsoft had known about it and patched the problem 6 months earlier, but people just weren’t patching SQL Server. There was a widespread mentality that only service packs were necessary, not individual hotfixes.
The problem was made worse because back then, many servers were directly exposed to the Internet, publicly accessible with a minimum amount of protection. Since all the worm needed was access to