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Microsoft has released details about a massive web attack that happend on April 17, 2008. Hundreds of thousands of pages on legitimate domains—including several at the United Nations and in the UK government—were attacked. Many of these sites ended up serving malware by redirecting users to malicious pages using JavaScript and IFRAMES. Users’ PCs were loaded with a malware program that tried eight different exploits in an attempt to hijack the system.Panda Security told SC US last week that hackers are injecting SQL code in web pages by taking advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web server as part of the mass attack.

Other security companies also blamed the attacks on a vulnerability in Microsoft’s web server software. Some concluded that the problem was related to an advisory regarding a bug in multiple Windows versions that could be exploited through Internet Information Services (ISS) and SQL Server. The same day as the attacks started, Microsoft disclosed an advisory for the security issue. Bill Staples has released the following statement at the company’s findings on his IIS blog:

Microsoft has investigated these reports and determined that the attacks are not related to the recent Microsoft Security Advisory (951306) or any known security issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net or Microsoft SQL technologies. Instead, attackers have crafted an automated attack that can take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web pages that do not follow security best practices for web application development. While these particular attacks are targeting sites hosted on IIS web servers, SQL injection vulnerabilities may exist on sites hosted on any platform.

According to Microsoft, end users should apply updates for all their Microsoft client software since the company does not have a reason to believe that the vulnerabilities being exploited do not have patches issued for them. Disabling JavaScript is also an option, but many sites today become next to unusable without it.