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Mass Website Hack Compromises 200,000 Sites
Stony Stevenson writes "Hot on the heels of a recent hack in which 10,000 sites were compromised, researchers have disclosed a new large-scale attack. Researchers at McAfee estimated that the attack has been active for roughly one week, and in that time frame has managed to place itself on roughly 200,000 web pages. Most of the infected pages are running the phpBB forum software, said McAfee. The compromised pages are embedded with a Javascript file that links to the site hosting the attack."
The title (which appears to be the only part the submitter actually "authored") is incorrect and conflicts with the text it quotes. An estimated 200,000 pages (most likely individual posts in phpBB forums) are out there, not sites.
According to this video, the pages are being inserted via SQL injection attacks. The 200k pages is based on a google search (he does not reveal what criteria he is searching for) which came back with 150k hits. So it is not clear how many actual sites are compromised. One could assume that once a phpBB site is compromised, every page of every thread, which is analogous to individual web pages, would redirect to the worm download site. A popular forum could easily have several thousand thread-pages. In fact, every single page would probably be redirecting, which would include each user's summary page (which would be in the thousands for even a small site). So a small number of cites could be accounting for all the 200k pages.
Also, in the video it is clear from the url that it is a phpBB2 site that is compromised. phpBB is currently at a major version of 3.
Better known as 318230.
Actually, that's not quite true: my brother's website was abused like this, which resulted in Google referrals warning that "this site contains malicious software". His company ranking was Number 1 in every Google search for his type of service. It's proving very expensive for him.
Ok, what?
First, I'm not sure if your talking ASP or ASP.Net, but either way the vast majority of your comment can be shortened to:
There are lots of PHP packages out there. People think they are safe because they are not MS. PHP packages should be re-written in ASP. PHP breaks due to updates but ASP updates better, therefore ASP is a better choice. PHP isn't inherently insecure, it's the packages.
Your entire statement boils down to this logic:
1) There are a lot of insecure Packages in PHP
3) It's not an insecurity in PHP, it's an insecurity in the packages
2) ASP updates better than PHP
Your comparing apples (ASP) to oranges (PHP Packages). I have no experience how well or poorly the security of packages in PHP perform against the security of packages in ASP.Net, we would have to pick a large pool of them to find out. And just because Windows Updates makes updates available for ASP.Net does not mean that people actually are that willing to reboot their web farms for every update that appears. Your saying the problem is bad coding and that ASP solves it, I would beg to differ.
And here is my anecdotal comment:
I have answered thousands of ASP questions (ASP used to be my primary web 'language') as well as written/re-written many sites and over time I have seen a lot of site examples and snippets that would leave a page wide open or in a position to break on regular occasions (or just plain didn't work). On the other hand I have worked with several PHP packages that were solidly put together and worked against a range of PHP versions. PHP must be better because I haven't personally seen anywhere near as many errors in coding as I have in ASP. None of the first several thousand ASP posts would work at all against the next version of the language (ASP 3 => ASP.Net) and needed to be rewritten from scratch, but most or all of the packages I used with PHP 4 worked just fine with PHP 5.
Whee signature.