News

Microsoft Advisory Targets SQL Injection Attacks

Microsoft on Tuesday issued a new security advisory after the discovery of "a recent escalation in a class of attacks" targeting Web sites.

Microsoft on Tuesday issued a new security advisory after the discovery of "a recent escalation in a class of attacks" targeting Web sites. The exploits are associated with Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework, with SQL Server used as an entry vector for so-called SQL injection attacks.

ASP lets developers create dynamic Web pages, supporting interactive browser-based applications and e-commerce by connecting with a relational database (such as SQL Server) on the back end.

Even though Microsoft's technologies are used in the attacks, the fault lies with Web site developers that haven't followed the best practices for security, according to Redmond.

"[The attacks] do not exploit a specific software vulnerability, but instead, target Web sites that do not follow secure coding practices for accessing and manipulating data stored in a relational database," wrote Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft in an e-mail to Redmondmag.com on Tuesday.

Microsoft's advisory describes three tools that can help protect individual Web sites from SQL injection attacks, according to Sisk. You can also find links to these tools at Microsoft's data platform blog here. According to Redmond, the free and downloadable tools come with detection and defense features.

SQL injection attacks are becoming increasingly common. In April, security consultancy White Hat identified isolated cases of SQL-based Web sites injected with malicious JavaScript code. Perhaps the worst of it was seen January, when a widespread barrage of SQL injection attacks occurred. At that time, tens of thousands of Windows- and SQL-based workstations were affected, as well as several thousand Web sites with .gov and .edu domain suffixes. Many of the problems were remedied before serious damage could be done.

About the Author

Jabulani Leffall is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Investor's Business Daily, The Economist and CFO Magazine, among others.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events