Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-043

From Microsoft:

This is a cumulative patch that includes the functionality of all previously released patches for SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000. In addition, it eliminates a newly discovered vulnerability.

SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 provide for extended stored procedures, which are external routines written in programming languages such as C or C#. These procedures appear as normal stored procedures to users and can be invoked and executed just like normal stored procedures. By default, SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 ship with a number of extended stored procedures which are used for various helper functions.

Some of the Microsoft-provided extended stored procedures that have the ability to reconnect to the database as the SQL Server service account have a flaw in common  namely, they have weak permissions that can allow non-privileged users to execute them. Because these extended stored procedures can be made to run with administrator privileges on the database, it is thus possible for a non-privileged user to run stored procedures on the database with administrator privileges.

An attacker could exploit this vulnerability in one of two ways. The attacker could attempt to load and execute a database query that calls one of the affected extended store procedures. Alternately, if a web-site or other database front-end were configured to access and process arbitrary queries, it could be possible for the attacker to provide inputs that would cause the query to call one of the functions in question with the appropriate malformed parameters.

Download the patch for SQL Server 7.0. Click on the Alternate Download link for 2000.