NHS website affected by mass SQL 'Asprox' attack

published 16 July 2008

The National Health Service's official website, NHS.uk, was one of a thousand websites compromised by a massive web attack this month, according to Finjan.

In its latest blog, Finjan said that the attack was caused by a trojan toolkit called Asprox', which has been around for a while, gaining popularity during 2007.

The toolkit works by first searching Google for webpages with the file extension '.asp'. Once found, it launches an SQL injection attack, which appends a reference to the malware file using the iframe (SCRIPT) tag. The most serious attack of recent times was back in April when IT PRO reported on a SQL attack which affected half a million websites.

Each of the 1,000 or so different compromised websites included a reference to malware which was in turn served by 160 other internet domains.

Finjan chief technical officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak believed that as the malware serving domains were increasing, much more was to come from Asprox.

"Among the compromised websites we found were those of respectable organisations, governmental institutes, health care organisations as well as high-ranked websites," he said.

Another website said to be affected were atdmt.com, a digital media company which Microsoft are looking at acquiring. The official websites for the government of San Francisco and the University of California were also compromised.

Get the ITPro daily newsletter