You have likely been tracking the mass SQL Injections that are currently sweeping through the net. Just last night I was shopping on www.ihomeaudio.com when I noticed they had been injected (they have since fixed their site). HP started to observe these attacks in January. They spread to over 500,000 sites by April before calming down and then picking up again in May. Most of the sites hit were initally Microsoft IIS ASP applications, causing many security companies to mistake this for some sort of new vulnerability in IIS and leading Microsoft to research the possibility, but alas, it's just our old friend, SQL Injection. Indeed we now see this attack hitting ASP and PHP sites and thanks to Google, it's easy to see just which sites out there have been hit.
While we were closely following the situation, the nice folks at Microsoft contacted us to see if we could work together to help people identify and cope with this issue. Together we quickly developed an action plan. The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) was in a tough spot, hundreds of thousands of ASP sites were getting hacked, yet the vulnerability wasn't something Microsoft could release a patch for. SQL Injection is an issue that occurs because of poorly written web code interfacing with the web sites backend database and the solution was much more complicated than a simple patch. Developers were going to have to learn about security and were going to have to patch their code if they were going to solve this. Microsoft's Security Vulnerability Research & Defense has a blog about this problem as well where they share Microsoft's recomendations for this problem.
Now if you are no stranger to web security, you might be saying "well duh" right about now. Unfortunately to at least 500,000 sites on the Internet this concept is still pretty new and if you are one of the folks who are just now learning what SQL Injection is, I highly recomend you read HP's Web Security Research Group white papers on verbose and blind SQL injection located in our HP application security resource library.
Introducing HP Scrawlr
When Microsoft contacted us, they asked us to equip their customers with the tools necessary to quickly find SQL Injection vulnerabilities in their sites. HP's application security software, DevInspect, QAInspect and WebInspect all find SQL Injection and countless other security vulnerabilities. DevInspect can even inspect your source code for SQL Injection as well and guide developers through the process of fixing their code. But what if you need to just quickly look for SQL Injection before you decide how you are going handle the issue? We needed something quick, highly accurate and easy to download and install.
Scrawlr, developed by the HP Web Security Research Group in coordination with the MSRC, is short for SQL Injector and Crawler. Scrawlr will crawl a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Scrawlr is lightning fast and uses our intelligent engine technology to dynamically craft SQL Injection attacks on the fly. It can even provide proof positive results by displaying the type of backend database in use and a list of available table names. There is no denying you have SQL Injection when I can show you table names!
Technical details for Scrawlr
- Identify Verbose SQL Injection vulnerabilities in URL parameters
- Can be configured to use a Proxy to access the web site
- Will identify the type of SQL server in use
- Will extract table names (verbose only) to guarantee no false positives
Scrawlr does have some limitations versus our professional solutions and our fully functional SQL Injector tool
- Will only crawls up to 1500 pages
- Does not support sites requiring authentication
- Does not perform Blind SQL injection
- Cannot retrieve database contents
- Does not support JavaScript or flash parsing
- Will not test forms for SQL Injection (POST Parameters)
Download Scrawlr
You can download Scrawlr by visiting the following link: https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/wwcampaign/1-57C4K/index.php?mcc=DNXA&jumpid=in_r11374_us/en/large/tsg/w1_0908_scrawlr_redirect/mcc_DNXA.
Scrawlr is offered as-is and is not a supported product. Assistance may be available from other Scrawlr users in our online Scrawlr forum located at http://www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/forums/198.aspx.
You can learn more about the HP Web Application Security Group and the HP Application Security Center by visiting our Security Community site at www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/ or by visiting our product information page at www.hp.com/go/securitysoftware/
Posted
06-24-2008 1:00 PM
by
erik.peterson