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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.