Mid-year Security Report: Websites, Open Source, Social Networking at Risk
IBM, Websense issue semi-annual report findings; SQL injection attacks made their mark.
Thu, July 31, 2008
Network World — IBM and Websense are separately issuing their semiannual security trend reports this week, and the picture isn't pretty for Web sites, open source software and social networking programs.
The IBM Internet Security Systems "Midyear Trend Statistics" report tracked 3,534 disclosed vulnerabilities in software for the first half of the year, a 5 percent increase from the first half of 2007. When it comes to the Top Ten worst offenders in terms of vulnerabilities, big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Cisco and Oracle continue to make the list. But this time they are joined by names in the open source software community: Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Linux.
"IBM makes a lot of software, and companies that make a lot of software are subject to more disclosures," says Tom Cross,
X-Force researcher at IBM ISS, by way of explaining why IBM and other software giants make the Top Ten disclosures
list.
But this is the first time that community-developed open source software such as the Drupal and Joomla! content-management software packages for the Web also showed up on the list.
Drupal and Joomla! are open source packages that "have both been vulnerable to SQL injection attacks," Cross says.
The
first half of this year will be remembered far and wide for SQL injection attacks. A massive series of such attacks struck
earlier this year across the
Internet, hitting Web sites based on Microsoft's Internet Information Server.
Vulnerabilities in both proprietary and open source software has led to a spike in SQL injection as well as cross-site
scripting
attacks that allow perpetrators to compromise Web servers, loading them up with malicious code for their own
designs.
According to the Websense "State of Internet Security Q1-Q2" report, the situation regarding compromised Web
sites is becoming
dire.
"Sixty percent of the of 100 most-popular Web sites have been hosting malicious code or inadvertently distributing it," says Stephan Chenette, manager of the Websense Security Labs, adding, "75 percent of malicious websites in general are actually legitimate Web sites that are compromised." That's a huge jump from last year when Websense surmised that number stood at 51 percent.
Some popular websites inadvertently hosting malicious code during the last half include CNET.com, MSNBC.com and News.com, Chenette says. "We've seen malicious code on Yahoo.com, Excite.com and perl.com, which is popular with developers. We've seen banner ads, which can be purchased on Yahoo, used for malicious code."
