According to John Leyden (from "The Register") in his article "
Security gumshoes locate source of mystery web compromise", the source of the mystery injection of more than 10,000 websites back in January has been uncovered!
He says:
"Thousands of legitimate websites were compromised at the start of the year to serve up malware, as we
reported at the time.
It seemed
that the exploitation of SQL Injection vulnerabilities was involved in
the automated attacks. The precise mechanism was unclear until earlier
this week when security researchers discovered a malicious executable
later linked to the attack on a hacker site.
The hacker utility used search engines to find insecure websites
that it then tried to exploit using an SQL injection attack. The
exploit included an SQL statement that tried to inject a script tag
into every HTML page on the website.
The tool - which had an interface written in Chinese - was
programmed by default to insert a tag to the same malicious JavaScript
file that featured in the January attack, solid evidence that it was at
least partially behind the assault.
The tool runs a script called pay.asp, hosted on a server in China.
This suggests that hackers running the attack were keeping count of the
number of sites they had compromised, in order to work out how much
they stand to get paid.
Further analysis of the tool by security researchers at the SANS
Institute's Internet Storm Centre (ISC) is ongoing. The tool came to
their attention via a tip-off from Dr Neal Krawetz. The initial attack
was uncovered by security researcher Mary Landesman, of ScanSafe, who
described it as the time as a new type of compromise.
The constant, changing flux of the malicious JavaScript served up by
compromised sites made initial analysis difficult. With the benefit of
the hacker tool used to pull off the attack this all becomes much
clearer, much like it was easier for scientists to unravel a cure for
the mystery pandemic that blighted mankind in the Twelve Monkies after they obtained a sample of the pure source.
"The nice thing about this is that we finally managed to confirm
that it is SQL Injection that was used in those attacks. The tool has
more functionality that we still have to analyze but this is the main
purpose," writes ISC handler Bojan Zdrnja.
Website owners ought to use the discovery as a wake up call on the
need to ensure that their web applications are secure, he added."
If you are worried about SQL injection and other attacks on your website then you should take a look at Barracuda Network's newest solution called the
Website Firewall. For more information or to arrange for an eval unit please visit:
www.BarracudaNetworks.ca/Searchresult.aspx?CategoryID=74.