7July_17_2008 Third wave of SQL injection attacks
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=153770

MAY 13, 2008 | Researchers say the latest wave of Web hacks is related but more sophisticated -- and may have spawned copycat attacks.

David Dewey, manager of IBM ISS X-Force Research, says the latest round of SQL injection attacks on legitimate Websites are using commands that aren’t typical SQL commands. “These are commands that are intended to hide from network monitoring devices” such as IPSes and Web application firewalls, Dewey says. “The changes we're seeing are in their obfuscation techniques."

X-Force has seen anywhere from 20 to 30 new malicious sites popping up each day to host the malicious content that the attacks use, he says. The attacks for the most part have been out of China, Dewey says, but there’s been a growing trend of the attacks coming out of Europe as well.

He and his team believe the attack was initially organized by a single group, likely in China. “Then it caught on, and there were more waves,” some of which were possibly copycat attacks as well as other groups joining in, he says.

X-Force first noticed someone experimenting with this very type of attack that’s now underway back in January. So far, the infected Websites have been random victims, Dewey says. “As far as we can tell, the targets seem to be arbitrary. They blast it out and whoever accepts this SQL injection ends up being attacked.”

And although the attackers are using SQL injection to infect the Website applications, SQL injection is really just a means to setting up a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, Dewey says. “When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, this is a cross-site scripting attack. SQL injection was just a vehicle to get there,” he says. “That’s because this is a more likely source of a persistent XSS than if the vehicle was XSS itself,” which would require a more targeted attack rather than the blanket one we’re seeing, he says.

And expect yet another wave of SQL injection attacks, he says. “There will be a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth."

“Frankly, SQL injection [vulnerabilities] have been so prolific for so long I’m surprised it took so long for it to be” exploited this way, Dewey says.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

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http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/04/microsoft-datab.html

A new SQL injection attack aimed at Microsoft IIS web servers has hit some 500,000 websites, including the United Nations, UK Government sites and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While the attack is not Microsoft's fault, it is unique to the company's IIS server.

The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft’s IIS servers allow generic commands that don’t require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites’ creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw.

In other words, there’s no patch that’s going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input.

The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user’s PC.

Most of the larger sites affected have already long since repaired themselves and claim that the underlying problems in their code have been fixed. However, if you don’t want to take the chance there’s a simple way to avoid the problem — use Firefox with NoScript. Since the attack loads a script from a different domain, NoScript will stop it from running.

If your site has been affected you’re going to need to restore your database from a clean backup copy and start reviewing your code to make sure all input is properly sanitized, otherwise you’ll just get hit again. Should you not have a clean backup of you database hackademix.net has a workaround for rerunning the attack, but changing a couple lines to remove the injected JavaScript.

If you’ve been hit by the attack, you should, as Bill Sisk, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing, Response Communications Manager, suggests on his blog, report the attack.

Anyone believed to have been affected can visit: http://www.microsoft.com/protect/support/default.mspx and should contact the national law enforcement agency in their country. Those in the United States can contact Customer Service and Support at no charge using the PC Safety hotline at 1-866-PCSAFETY. Additionally, customers in the United States should contact their local FBI office or report their situation at: www.ic3.gov.

So far there have been no details about who is behind the attacks.

Massive Attack: Half A Million Microsoft-Powered Sites Hit With SQL Injection