Half a Million Microsoft-Powered Sites Hit With SQL Injection

Titus Germanicus writes to tell us that a recent attack has compromised somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 pages with a SQL injection attack. The vulnerability seems to be limited to Microsoft's IIS webserver and is easily defeated by the end user with Firefox and "NoScript." "The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft's IIS servers allow generic commands that don't require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites' creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw. In other words, there's no patch that's going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input. The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user's PC." Ignoring corporate spin-doctoring, there seems to be plenty of blame to go around.