Mass hack infects tens of thousands of sites
Tens of thousands of Web sites have been compromised by an automated SQL injection attack, and although some have been cleaned, others continue to serve visitors a malicious script that tries to hijack their PCs using multiple exploits, security experts said this weekend.
Roger Thompson, the chief research officer at Grisoft, pointed out that the hacked sites could be found via a simple Google search for the domain that hosted the malicious JavaScript. On Saturday, said Thompson, the number of sites that had fallen victim to the attack numbered more than 70,000. “This was a pretty good mass hack,” said Thompson, in a post to his blog. “It wasn’t just that they got into a server farm, as the victims were quite diverse, with presumably the only common point being whatever vulnerability they all shared.”
Symantec cited reports by other researchers — including one identified only as “websmithrob” — that fingered a SQL vulnerability as the common thread. “The sites [were] hacked by hacking robot by means of a SQL injection attack, which executes an iterative SQL loop [that] finds every normal table in the database by looking in the sysobjects table and then appends every text column with the harmful script,” said websmithrob in a blog post. “It’s possible that only Microsoft SQL Server databases were hacked with this particular version of the robot since the script relies on the sysobjects table that this database contains.”
