Mass hack infects tens of thousands of sites

[Tami]

From ComputerWorld:

Mass hack infects tens of thousands of sites
Then they serve visitors multiple exploits, including October RealPlayer attack
by Gregg Keizer

January 07, 2008 (Computerworld) -- 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.

Roger Thompson, the chief research officer at Grisoft SRO, pointed out that the hacked sites could be found via a simple Google search for the domain that hosted 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. "It wasn't just that they got into a server farm, as the victims were quite diverse, with presumably the only common point being whatever vulnerability they all shared."

Symantec Corp. cited reports by other researchers -- including one identified only as "websmithrob" -- that fingered a SQL vulnerability as the common thread. "The sites [were] hacked by hacking robot by means of a SQL injection attack, which executes an iterative SQL loop [that] finds every normal table in the database by looking in the sysobjects table and then appends every text column with the harmful script," said websmithrob in a blog post. "It's possible that only Microsoft SQL Server databases were hacked with this particular version of the robot since the script relies on the sysobjects table that this database contains."

According to websmithrob, the attack appends a JavaScript tag to every piece of text in the SQL database; the tag instructs any browser that reaches the site to execute the script hosted on the malicious server.

Hacked sites included both .edu and .gov domains, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) reported in a warning posted last Friday. The ISC also reported that several pages of security vendor CA Inc.'s Web site had been infected.

...continue reading the full article...

[Josh]

Uh... It's really scary thinking that someone can massively infect websites all over the world like this :S