New bug found in Sendmail

digitalsidhe has written a wonderful summary of a new bug discovered in sendmail (and another in Snort, a common Intrusion Detection System), both of which allow root access to unpatched machines, and why you should hurry to patch your machines right now---or why you should mention this to your sysadmin, so he can get on top of the situation now.

Once a bug like this is found, you can bet some enterprising programmer gets right on the job of writing a worm or virus to exploit the weakness, knowing that there will be a sizeable percentage of servers out there that will still be vulerable to it.

The cause of both bugs? Buffer overflow, something that every programmer should be aware of, and write code with that awareness in mind.