"The Asprox botnet, a relatively small botnet known mainly for sending phishing emails, has been spotted in the last few days installing an SQL injection attack tool on its bots. The bots then Google for .asp pages with specific terms -- and then hit the sites found in the search return with SQL injection attacks, says Joe Stewart, director of malware research for SecureWorks, who has documented his findings on the attack.

Stewart says the Asprox botnet’s SQL injection attack is likely a copycat of the recent SQL injection Website attacks from China, which deliver a Trojan that steals online gaming passwords. But this is the first SQL injection attack Stewart has seen using a botnet and a toolkit to do the dirty work. Asprox so far has infected over 1,000 Websites this way, he says.

“I’ve seen bots get other types of infection tools, but not SQL injection” tools, Stewart says. “It’s almost like they noticed the Chinese[-based] attack and copied their code into their own binary for their own attack... The hacks are so similar to the way the other SQL injection attacks are going." - DarkReading

3-4 years ago when I worked at SPI Dynamics (now HP) two PoC tools had been created for internal security research. They didn't do anything malicious just test the concept of using search engines to find hosts and test them for a sql error message. These tools worked so well in finding 'suspect' hosts that while it was very cool/scary, we decided speaking about it to the public was a bad idea. It was only going to have negative affects and we didn't want to be accountable for introducing this extremely handy method to the attackers as we knew how large the problem was. 3-4 years later this is the 'new' toolkit to have on the block. This makes me wonder what is being discovered now that we won't be hearing about for another few years.

This is hardly the last you'll be hearing about search engine hacking. (what newbies now call google hacking)

Article Link: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=153921&WT.svl=news1_2