Opening a site Google has listed as spreading malicious software via the browser.
What is an SQL-injection. How can it affect my site. How does it happen and how can I avoid it?
Since Firefox (2 and 3) and MSIE 7 started using Google’s (and others) system for blocking sites that produce harmful web pages the problem with SQL-injections have been put on the spot.
What happens is that an attacker hacks a site by placing their own SQL-code into the database of the victim system. Instead of just performing a DOS (denial of service) attack bringing the whole site down by for instance deleting all the tables or doing something else harmful to the site the attacker plants client side browser code in the database making all visitors run client side code that will infect their computer with a virus. This virus may do everything from listening in on traffic between the client (web browser) and bank applications, to connecting the client system to a botnet.
Needless to say, the SQL-injection attack has become a problem not so much for the owner of the originally defunct site as for the visitors to said site. (Although users of the web should not underestimate the consequence of a good virus protection, system update policy and secure browsing policy).
Since the owner of the vulnerable software won’t notice any detour from business as usual (and neither will most infected clients), nobody is the wiser to the problem.
This is why Google (and others) have started evaluating (and flagging) sites with bad content, and why Firefox and MSIE (and probably others) have started blocking them.
