SQL Infection Hits Over 500K Webpages, Infiltrates DHS And UN
Update: Microsoft’s Bill Sisk offers a denial on the company’s IIS blog that the MS SQL Server technology has no association with the SQL vulnerability described in the security concern mentioned below.
SQL, one of the most widely utilized server technologies today, is going through a particularly rough time. According to the Dan Goodin of The Register, a “sophisticated mass infection that is injecting code into hundreds of thousands of reputable webpages is growing and even infiltrated the website of the [U.S.] Department of Homeland Security.”
As of Friday, some 520,000 pages had been catalogued by Google as contaminated, with victims including the sites operated by the U.S. government, the United Nations, and the UK Civil Service, among others. As for the vulnerabilities of particular strings of SQL, both MySQL and PostgreSQL “are less easily fooled,” says researcher Ronald van den Heetkamp. Because SQL infection is comprised mostly of HEX code, which partially obscures its true identity, Microsoft SQL is apparently particularly susceptible to infiltration.
The response to the SQL hack has been quick-footed, particularly on the governmental front. Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said that security specialists “scrubbed the page clean the same day it got infected and took steps to make sure the same attack couldn’t succeed against other parts of the DHS website.”
No word has been offered as to the identity of the attackers, but the methodology employed, according to Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, shows that they had effectively obtained a “skeleton key” for the Web systems used by various companies and organizations.
(Image source: The Register)
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[...] another nice blog post (although it’s SQL Injection, not a SQL Infection) that talks about this current outbreak and [...]