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Michael S. Mimoso, Editorial DirectorObviously I don't know the configuration of your firewall, but Sapphire, aka Slammer, uses UDP port 1434. Note that this is not TCP port 1434.
If you are using a Microsoft SQL server behind your corporate firewall that is accessible from outside the firewall, then you definitely had UDP ports 1433/1434 open, because the SQL server will not work without that.
So, to mitigate against this threat, you could have kept your systems up to date with the current patches, or you could have blocked those ports and done without an SQL server. The flaw that was exploited was reported more than six months ago, and patches have been available since then. There really was no reason for any server to be infected.
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This was first published in February 2003