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Mass Hack Infects Tens of Thousands of Sites
An anonymous reader writes "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. Hacked sites included both .edu and .gov domains, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center reported in a warning posted last Friday. The ISC also reported that several pages of security vendor CA's Web site had been infected. 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 hosts 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." By Sunday a second round of the same attack had infected over 90,000 servers.
I don't know about "awesome," my first thoughts were along the lines of "oh...for fuck's sake..." and "how do I check?"
While I share your appreciation of feats, I'd prefer the feat achieved to be a positive application of the knowledge rather than a mass-hack.
But hey; that's just me being a grumpy old folk I guess.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Reading the referenced article it seems to almost applaud the success of the attack. This isn't a "good" attack its a very bad attack in that it has been successful and could potentially inflict damage on thousands or even millions of users. Its like claiming that something was a very "good" fraud because it robbed thousands of old folks of their life savings.
Its a bad attack, its bad that its been successful and the people who did it are scum. These aren't some rebels fighting against the system they are criminal scum who are aiming to inflict damage on large numbers of people. Remember all those times when you have to clean up your parents/in-law/friends computers because they get compromised by this crap? Well the scum behind this have just given you a whole lot more time doing crappy boring work.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So far, so good, it's still at 1.
I am astounded at the (much more than usual) level of misunderstanding of how the attack works. I've seen one correct comment, and much blathering idiocy!
Running LAMP might protect you from this particular attack only because it is looking for table/column information the MS-SQL way. If you aren't taking effective steps to prevent SQL injection (which has nothing to do with "gaining root"), only luck is keeping it from happening to your LAMP system.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
ah ok let me just look this up on the vulnerability chart here ok, your server is Linux... very good, very good your databases are all only accessible to localhost, ok looks like you are EXACTLY as vulnerable to SQL injection as everyone else. Running Linux and preventing remote users on your database does NOT protect you. If you have a script on your server that doesn't sanitize even one input, you are just asking for trouble. you WILL get hacked sooner or later.
Username taken, please choose another one.