New SQL Injection Attack Fuses Malware, Phishing

PainMeds tips a recent post in Secure Computing's research blog describing a new SQL injection attack that had infected thousands of MSSQL-based web servers by last weekend, turning them into malware delivery systems. The attack apparently rewrites the server's Web pages to include JavaScript which pushes malware to the visitor as if it were from the genuine site. Sites using Sybase might possibly be vulnerable, as it uses the same exploited syntax that MSSQL does. The post includes an example of the attack. Unlike most malware attacks, this one appears to originate from the site the user is actually visiting. From the blog: "'Similar to phishing, this attack takes advantage of the website visitor's trust in the site they are visiting. Instead of phishing for information, however, malware is sent to the client, which the client has a higher likelihood of accepting being from a trusted site... These web pages are associated with Web sites from around the world and supplying various content — including government sites, sales sites, real estate sites, and financial information sites among others."

Comments

Am I in a time warp?

[johnathan]

This attack has been going on for months... http://hackademix.net/2008/04/26/mass-attack-faq/

Re:Not really new

[jtcm]

Many SQL Calls are decades old and were copied and pasted assumed what isn't broke don't fix.

All too true. My company maintains some sites that were originally written during the 90s by a different web consulting company. The sites were happily chugging along and serving up pages for upwards of 10 years, until last weekend when they were hit with the exact attack described in this article. Fortunately, the attack was noticed early and we were able to fix the problem quickly, resulting in a minimal impact on our client's users.

I wasn't involved much with the emergency fixes, but our team ended up installing a product called dotDefender that seems to have done a fantastic job of filtering out malicious requests. It inspects GET and POST data _before_ it's passed on to the vulnerable application and stops the request if it detects things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, or other attacks. If you use IIS6 and have a lot of vulnerable code; or, like us, some of the bad code is contained within compiled libraries for which you don't possess the original source, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Alternatively, there's a free ISAPI filter that will perform similar pre-application-level checking of GET and POST data, though I believe it only checks for SQL injection, and I can't vouch for it since I've never seen it in action.

Unfortunately, I don't believe either of these solutions work with IIS7, so if your sites run on IIS7, I wish you luck!