The 10.000 web sites infection mystery solved
Published: 2008-04-16, Last Updated: 2008-04-16 19:14:00 UTC by Bojan Zdrnja (Version: 3)
Back in January there were multiple reports about a large number of web sites being compromised and serving malware. Fellow handler Mari wrote the initial diary at
Later we did several diaries where we analyzed the attacks, such as the one I wrote at
Yesterday, one of our old friends, Dr. Neal Krawetz, pointed us to another site hosting malicious JavaScript files with various exploits. While those exploits where more or less standard, we managed to uncover a rare gem between them - the actual executable that is used by the bad guys in order to compromise web sites.
While we had a general idea about what they do during these attacks, and we knew that they were automated, we did not know exactly how the attacks worked, or what tools the attackers used. The strategy was relatively simple: they used search engines in order to find potentially vulnerable applications and then tried to exploit them. The exploit just consisted of an SQL statement that tried to inject a script tag into every HTML page on the web site.
The utility we recovered does the same thing. The interface appears to be is in Chinese so it is a bit difficult to navigate around the utility, but we did some initial analysis of the code (which is very big) to confirm what it does.
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