Microsoft plugs privilege elevation flaw in SQL Server

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 software both contain a critical flaw that would allow low-privilege users to elevate their privilege level and make changes to tasks created by other users, the company said yesterday.
The two SQL Server versions provide "stored procedures," collections of Transact-SQL statements that are stored under one name and processed as a group, Microsoft said. These are normally used for managing SQL Server and for displaying information about databases and users.
One of these stored procedures lets users run, delete, insert or update Web tasks. Web tasks let a Web developer create an Active Server Page that sends a request to the SQL Server for an HTTP file containing the data it needs.
Normally, only administrators and database operators should be able to do this, but currently lower-privilege users can do so.
An attacker, if able to authenticate to the server as a low-privilege user, could take advantage of this to delete, insert or change the Web tasks created by other users. The attacker could also run previously created tasks in the context of the creator of those tasks.
The attacker would need to be an authenticated user of the system and could change or run only existing Web tasks, not create new ones, Microsoft said.
A patch for the flaw is posted on Microsoft's TechNet Web site.