Jeff Atwood has a great series of screen shots describing how malware distributors spoof user interfaces to convince users to install their software. The more operating system and browser vendors do to prevent people from inadvertently installing software they don’t want, the more the malware distributors do to entice people to override the security measures that are in place to help install software that can only harm them.

This is just one of many arms race scenarios that plague the digital world. As DRM improves, people come up with better ways to crack the DRM. As Blizzard comes up ways to keep people from artificially inflating their arena ranking in World of Warcraft, players come up with newer and better ways to game the system. And as antivirus and anti-fishing software gets better, criminals figure out better ways to enlist the user in circumventing that software.

What I’m trying to figure out is where it ends. How much freedom must computer users volunteer to give up in order to be able to use the Web relatively safely?

I’ve been reading up on the mass SQL injection attack launched against servers running IIS and MS SQL Server last week. That article is a bit out of date, as the problem turned out not to be a security hole in IIS but rather security holes in the Web applications themselves. The script that compromised the sites was clever enough to probe for forms that didn’t prevent SQL injection, and injected SQL specifically designed to work with MS SQL.

The article linked to also says that the attacks were first reported on April 17, but I found an incident report from April 13 describing the attack.

The end goal of these attacks is to infect client PCs with malware. The attacks appends database fields with markup that includes JavaScript from a third party domain, and then when any page that displays the field is viewed by a user, the JavaScript is downloaded and executed, any unpatched client PCs will be infected by the malware.

IIS.net has a post that explains exactly how the attack works. The script finds a form on the site that does not properly escape user input and injects SQL that finds all of the text columns in the database and appends the HTML that loads the malware to each of them. You can read more about it here. The main innovation in this attack is the cleverly written SQL injected that’s ejected. A similar attack could be launched against any application that does not protect against SQL injection. MySQL is somewhat protected in that most sites are running MySQL 4.x, which doesn’t provide support for stored procedures.

There are several takeaways from these attacks:

• The only common vector in these attacks is MS SQL Server. Any application that does not prevent SQL injection could be the vector. So a Java application running on Solaris or a PHP application running on Linux could also be affected if they store their data in MS SQL.
• You should minimize the privileges granted to the database user that the Web application uses. If your application uses the “root” or “sa” account, give up now. Just using grant all is the wrong idea for a production account. Figure out which privileges the account must have for your application to work properly, and grant only those.
• If you’re writing Web applications and you’re not sanitizing user input, you need to go back to the drawing board. I’m beginning to think that languages like PHP and libraries like J2EE should sanitize all input by default and force programmers to go out of their way to access the original input. In other words, in PHP, $_REQUEST should contain escaped data by default. Many programmers don’t know what they’re doing, and in the case of attacks like this one, it’s end users who get hurt, not just the people who wrote the compromised application.
• Just visiting Web sites you trust isn’t enough to keep you safe. Keeping your PC patched up and running security software is essential to preventing your PC from being compromised. It just keeps getting more dangerous.
• Replication and backup are two different things. When this attack was run, all of the bad information inserted by the attack was almost certainly copied to the replication server immediately. Taking a snapshot of your data frequently is perhaps more important than replication. (Those of us who have run an errant update or delete statement and wiped out a ton of data, only to see the results replicated immediately already know about the dangers of relying on replication.)

Bruce Schneier explains why he runs an open wireless network. I leave mine open as well, so it’s nice to know I’m in good company.