The number of SQL Injection attacks across the Internet continue to rise. I’m seeing regular posting on the SANS RSS feed related to SQL Injection and XSS these days and clients are finding that applications they thought were not vulnerable turn out to be vulnerable because of patches and custom mods they’ve had made to them.  For most site owners this meant going back to the developers and getting updates and this is generally costly and time consuming. Fortunately, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate and brought us a little relief in the form of URLScan 3.0 beta/go-live release.

Here’s a few links to get you to good stuff and hopefully save the day:

Microsoft Security Bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/954462.mspx

Link to download HP’s custom SQL injection scanner and how to use it. They created this for Microsoft to help you identify possible vulnerabilities in your site.

A source code analysis application that can help identify vulnerable code in your application.

UrlScan 3.0 Beta. I’m generally opposed to installing beta software on a production webserver but I think if you’re getting hammered, it’s probably better to just bite the bullet and do it.  As you probably know UrlScan was for the most part built into IIS 6 but it doesn’t have querystring filtering, this build does and it works with IIS5.1 and later including our beloved IIS 7.0. Kudos to the IIS Team!

Word of caution

Word of caution, I’ve installed this for a few people and a couple times it wouldn’t load after the initial install (Beta software). My fix for this was to install the ISAPI filter directly on the website in question. I used Filemon to watch for when it triggered and referenced the log files to tweak out false positives from there. Each site is unique so you’ll need to tweak your settings accordingly.

Another useful tool

LogParser is another great tool for reviewing your server logs and searching for information such as hack attempts. Steve Schofield has a nice write up about using LogParser and URLScan.

A few FAQ’s on this subject:

Q: Is it Microsoft’s fault and if not then who’s fault is it?
A: It’s yours and your developer’s fault. As hackers evolve so much our techniques to combat them.  Coding methods and ways to access SQL server have changed over the years as a result of this and if you haven’t had your site updated, then it’s your fault.

Q: I just moved my website to a new server and I’m getting hacked now and I wasn’t before. It’s the new server right?
A: No. This is a new type of worm if you will that affecting websites the fact that you changed hosts, websites or applications probably doesn’t have anything to do with it at all. This really started to become a huge problem around late April of this year and we’ve watched it grow into a bigger problem since then.

Q: Is URLScan the answer to my prayers?
A: Consider it a stopgap you’ll be able to employ until you’ve had your web applications updated. You really need to get your application secured.

Q: I haven’t been attacked, how do I know if I’m vulnerable?
A: Use the two tools above and also you might want to hire a service to do website security scans. If you’re hosted with Applied Innovations you can you get free quarterly security scans from scanalert.com.

Q: What kinds of applications are vulnerable? Is it just shopping carts?
A: Every application that accesses a database server of any kind is potentially vulnerable.

Q: My website is written in XXXX language and it’s supposed to be very secure, am I vulnerable?
A: Potentially, YES! Any web application that uses a database can be vulnerable.

With the new addition to the family I’ve got a renewed interest in taking photographs (and video) and ofcourse sharing them. Yeah, I’m one of those Dads.  So today I wanted to crop a image for William’s website (yeah, not even 5 days old and he’s already got his own website at http://williamcoburn.net ). The image I wanted to crop and enhance was of the wallpaper border in his room of Pooh Bear.  The only tools I had available on my desktop were picasa and snag-it.

So the first thing I started to do was download a trial of photoshop elements or paint shop pro (I miss the days JASC provided it). Then it struck me that Adobe recently made an online version of photoshop available called adobe photoshop express. I created a free account, uploaded the image was able to enhance, rotate and crop it within 5 minutes and the finished product is visible on William’s site.

So here’s a few online photo editors available for free (I love freebies):

Adobe Photoshop Express - Adobe’s actually late to the game but they have the name and reputation to bring them to #1 pretty quickly if not already.

FotoFlexer -  This is actually my favorite of the ones I played with tonight. It has a lot of features the others don’t seem to have and little gadgets I love like inserting your own face in a picture, creating little inspirational posters, etc.

Splashup - It seemed pretty basic to me and I really didn’t get that involved with it.

Picnik - I enjoyed using this one and found it really intuitive.

I also found a couple ASP.NET projects that seemed to offer basic features and could make a nice little runner up. Who knows maybe you’ll see photoeditor.jesscoburn.com before long

The folks over at Early Impact (makers of ProductCart) have released a tool to help remove JavaScript code from a SQL database that may have been hacked as part of the SQL Injection attacks taking place today on the Internet.  Here’s the details from their newsletter and a link to the SQL query you can execute.  Please be warned, I haven’t tested this so make sure you have a backup before executing it (just in case):

If your database is hacked

If your store is hacked (JavaScript code added to fields such as product names and descriptions), follow these steps

• Turn off the store
• Clean up the database by either:
  • Restoring a back-up copy
  • Running a query symmetrical to the offending query (download the SQL query here). Load the query in MS SQL query analyzer and run it multiple times until it says that “0 rows were affected”. Ask your Web master to do this for you, or open a support ticket with Early Impact. Note that this method might not be 100% effective.
• Make sure that you have installed the updated files above (and any other files that might be released related to this Security Alert).
• Re-open the store

My previous blog post attempted to explain SQL injection and why it’s a problem.   It’s started to get media coverage now and the media is looking for a target (scapegoat). So as is often the case, someone gets wrongly blamed and right now it’s of course Microsoft.

It’s NOT Microsoft’s fault.

Here’s what’s happening, recently Microsoft announced a couple new vulnerabilities and one of these was for IIS.  At the same time there’s a barrage of SQL Injection attacks being carried out and the natural assumption is “OH IT’S THOSE NEW VULNERABILITIES IN MICROSOFT”.  I guess they’ll never live down sasser and nimbda.  So I’m sorry, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault, it’s your code, fix your code.

Then Who’s fault is it?

It’s yours. You loaded unsafe code on your website and you didn’t fix it. Just restoring a backup of your database is not going to fix it, you’re still vulnerable.

Bill Staples has a blog posting about SQL Injection and references some good resources on his blog and also lays to rest the misconception that this is Microsoft’s fault.

Patrick S also has a great a great blog article on the current attacks on his blog at msblog.org that shows the decoded SQL code posted to sites and states that there are now 510,000 modified pages in Google as part of this same outbreak that all link back to 3 common sites. Unfortunately, he points out that it’s part of this IIS vulnerability when it’s not. 

Here’s another nice blog post (although it’s SQL Injection, not a SQL Infection) that talks about this current outbreak and references Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security who was the individual that pointed out to me last year that every website is vulnerable in some fashion.

Finally, Bill Sisk also putting the whole thing to rest that it’s not Microsoft’s fault.

At any rate, this is a pretty nasty outbreak and I’d recommend you hit some of the resources linked to in my earlier SQL Injection post….

It’s a shame but not many website owners or for that matter, web developers are familiar with what SQL Injection is and just why it’s something they need to worry about.  I’m noticing through various forums, friends, etc an increased number of sites being exploited for Cross Site Scripting through SQL Injection.  Most blog readers are going to say “HUH? Cross Eyed Scripting? What Injection?”

Here’s what I’m talking about, a hacker will come to your website and use SQL injection to gain access to your database so he can then run SQL queries against your database directly. He not only will have full read access to your database contents (if it’s an e-commerce site you are encrypting your customer information, right?) but he’ll be able to modify your database and place his own code in there.  What you might find is some iframe HTML code that’s calling some JavaScript file (www.domain.com/hackerscript.js) trying to make that load in your site instead of your actual content. Then some website visitor comes to your site and their browser attempts to run this JavaScript which downloads and installs a Trojan on their computer. Now not only is your site hacked but you’re spreading malware all over the Internet and if you don’t do something about it soon, you’re going to get flagged by Google and the other search engines.

Yes this is a bad bad thing.

UPDATE: Moments after posting this blog post I found a blog post about the United Nations Events page being marked as malware through SQL Injection

Learning more about SQL Injection

I’m not going to rehash all the gory details on SQL Injection but instead recommend you read the following references:

A great article on SQL Injection by Paul Litwin (he’s a programming superhero)

Neil Carpenter’s Blog articles on:  Anatomy of a SQL Injection Incident Part 1, and Part 2,  and SQL Injection a Comment.

ScottGu’s Blog: Tip/Trick: Guard Against SQL Injection Attacks

Michael Sutton’s Blog: How Prevalent are SQL Injection Vulnerabilities?

These articles all have links to other great articles and you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about SQL Injection

How do I know if I’m vulnerable to SQL Injection

The problem with SQL Injection is so many people out there are using scripts that they not only don’t know if they’re vulnerable but they don’t know how to fix it. So step #1 is to find out if you’re vulnerable and here’s my recommendations for that:

#1 ScanAlert.com - If you’re hosted at AppliedI.net they’ll provide you a year of quarterly scans for free and then reduced renewal. They also have a service called HackerSafe that does daily scans of your site and I highly recommend you use a service like this as they’ll really dig through your site and alert you that you’re vulnerable before it’s too late.

#2 Secunia.com - They provide a great resource cataloging vulnerable sites and providing frequent updates as new vulnerabilities are discovered. If you’re using any 3rd party applications (freeware, opensource, commercial, anything) I recommend you punch it in and take a look. For a quick reference, here’s a graphic representation of vulnerabilities in OSCommerce

And here’s one for all the Anti-Windows Hosting people.. Here’s all the vulnerabilities found in IIS6 since 2003 to today (there was one released just recently) there’s been 5 and all are either patched or workarounds provided:

Here’s the same graphic for Apache 2.0.X, there’s been 35 and looks like some are still unpatched or only partially fixed:

  From the Secunia Site you can get more information on security holes and the impact they have.  BTW, I did a quick search on advisories for SQL Injection, there were 2072 returned results. Yes, it’s a problem.

#3 Use another security scanner like Nessus, Acunetix, Elanize’s Web Security Scanner, etc.

How do I protect my site from SQL Injection?

So the big question is how do I protect my site from SQL Injection? The answer: YOU FIX YOUR CODE! The problem is not all website operators are website developers and they don’t know how to fix their site or they don’t have the resources (money, experience, etc) to fix their site. What are they to do? THEY HAVE TO FIX THEIR CODE! If you can’t fix it, I recommend you find a replacement application that’s not susceptible for SQL Injection. If you can’t find a replacement application and can’t fix your code here’s a few tips that might help but this really needs to be address at the application itself:

IIS 6 SQL Injection Sanitation ISAPI Wildcard - It’s an ISAPI filter that intercepts all requests and cleans out the dirty SQL injection code.

Port 80’s Server Defender - It protects against a lot more than just SQL injection and is billed as a Web application firewall.

A little ASP Script for cleaning inputs that you can incorporate into your application.

A little guidance from MSDN.

And numerous other resources out there for your review.

Conclusion

I don’t know why I always have a conclusion but you have to close your article somehow. In conclusion, I hope you spend some time and read a few of the articles linked to in this blog post. You’ll learn more about SQL Injection and hopefully avoid being compromised by it.