Meeting with Shawn about where we are at with end of year tax updates and changes. He has a number of new state and federal tax changes. His code isn't all the way done quite yet. We will be meeting again tomorrow. In the mean time, I will be running the tax table copier code that we have. We have to run this same report every year. It allows the payroll system to keep working and running. Then, as Shawn has his new changes, we run each smaller section and it strategically updates just certain pieces and parts of the federal and state withholdings tables. Good stuff.

After my meeting with Shawn, I started checking emails. It looks like there was a SQL injection hack against one of the servers yesterday. A SQL injection is where a hacker takes existing code and tries to find a weakness in the existing code. It basically has the server run a normal SQL query against the database, but part way through the normal process, it tries to break out of the normal flow and set some values, variables, and/or inject custom code. Wayne Andersen, one of our guys, was able to track it down and put a temporary patch on the code. The hacker was calling a sleep command on one of the servers which was virtually locking the database for a certain period of time. Not that I applaud this, but there are some pretty creative persons out there. I'm glad that we have some top level guys on our side. Anyways, I spent the rest of the morning making a few code changes to push up to all servers to keep things nice and tight.