Both Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have discovered new vulnerabilities in their databases, the two companies reported.

Microsoft on Wednesday issued a cumulative patch for three newly discovered holes. The first of these vulnerabilities, named-pipe hijacking, is the only one that could allow an attacker to gain inappropriate access to data, but it's not exploitable remotely—rather, the attacker would need to be an authenticated, local user.

Named-pipe hijacking consists of a flaw in the checking method for a named pipe. A named pipe is a specifically named one- or two-way channel for communication between a pipe server and one or more pipe clients. Upon system startup, SQL Server creates and listens on a specific, named pipe for incoming server connections. The named pipe is checked to verify which connection attempts can log on and execute queries to the system on which SQL Server is running.

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