Thousands Of Sites Infected In Renewed SQL Injection Attacks
Large numbers of legitimate Web sites, including government sites in the U.K. and some operated by the United Nations, have been hacked and are serving up malware as massive JavaScript attacks last detected in March resume. The same techniques as last month are used and among the sites hacked were several affiliated with either the UN or U.K. government agencies.
The exact number of sites that have been compromised is unknown but the estimation is that it’s similar to the March attacks, which at their height infected more than 100,000 URLs, including prominent domains such as MSNBC.com. Although the U.K.-based sites appeared to have been cleansed of the malicious JavaScript, the UN sites had not.
The attackers have now switched over to a new domain as their hub for hosting the malicious payload in this attack. Although the malware-hosting domain has changed, it’s located at a Chinese IP address, just like the one used in March. It also looks like they’re using just the one hosting site, but changing the link within the JavaScript. When a visitor reaches one of the hacked sites, the malicious JavaScript loads a file from the malware-hosting server, then redirects the browser to a different page, also hosted on the Chinese server. Once loaded, the file attempts eight different exploits, including one that hits a vulnerability in Internet Explorer’s handling of Vector Markup Language (VML) that was patched in January 2007.
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