New Injection Attack: 30,000 Websites Hit?
Over the last several years SQL injection has become one of the most common types of Web attack. According to security vendor Armorize, there is a new type of injection attack now on the horizon that may end up being even more widespread and dangerous. In fact, Amorize estimates that as many as 30,000 website might already be infected.
Mass meshing is a new type of redirection attack that differs from SQL injection in a number of critical ways. The most damaging difference is how users can mitigate the risks of a SQL injection versus the difficulties of defending against a Mass Meshing attack.
"The mass mesh victim sites are injected with JavaScript, but not to a small set of malicious redirectors, they are injected with malicious JavaScript that point to each other in a mesh," Wayne Huang, CTO at Armorize told InternetNews.com. "So the infected websites themselves are re-directors."
The mass mesh approach is in contrast with a traditional SQL injection attack where the site is injected with a malicious script that includes a redirector to a harmful domain. Those harmful domains can then just be blacklisted as a means of defense. With mass meshing, since the meshed sites are legitimate and always changing, it's significantly more difficult to simply block URLs.
