Hundreds of thousands of Web sites - including several at the United Nations and in the U.K. government — have been hacked recently and seeded with code that tries to exploit security flaws in Microsoft Windows to install malicious software on visitors’ machines.

The attackers appear to be breaking into the sites with the help of a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. In an alert issued last week, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of an unpatched flaw in IIS servers, but at the time it noted that it wasn’t aware of anyone trying to exploit that particular weakness.

On Thursday, Spanish anti-virus vendor Panda Security said that it had alerted Microsoft that a flaw IIS was the cause of all the break-ins. When I asked Microsoft whether they’d heard from Panda or if the hundreds of thousands of sites were hacked from a patched or unpatched flaw in IIS, a spokesman for the company didn’t offer much more information.

According to Finnish anti-virus maker F-Secure, the number of hacked Web pages serving up malicious software from this attack may be closer to half a million.

“The attacks are facilitated by SQL injection exploits and are not issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net, or Microsoft SQL technologies,” said Bill Sisk, a communications manager at Microsoft, in a blog post. “SQL injection attacks enable malicious users to execute commands in an application’s database.”

Sisk said that to defend against SQL injection attacks, developers should follow secure coding practices.

SQL injection attacks involve insufficiently filtered code submitted to SQL databases through user input mechanisms.

On Friday, U.S. CERT issued a warning about SQL injection attacks that have compromised a large number of legitimate Web sites. Affected Web sites contain injected JavaScript that attempts to exploit several known vulnerabilities. U.S. CERT recommends disabling JavaScript and ActiveX.

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Domain registrar and Web hosting provider Go Daddy (godaddy.com) announced on Wednesday that it has declared April 29 “Webmasters’ Day” (godaddy.com/webmastersday), which recognizes professionals responsible for the content on websites across the world.

Did you know there’s a day for honoring newspaper carriers? It’s September 4. There’s also Cartoonists’ Day (May 3), Doctors’ Day (March 30) AND Hairstylists’ Appreciation Day (April 30). So why shouldn’t there be a Webmasters’ Day?

On April 29, GoDaddy.com will send out special eCards thanking Webmasters around the globe for their tireless efforts to keep us all up and running. To make sure your Webmaster gets thanked on Webmasters’ Day, send an eCard now.

Go Daddy says it wanted to recognize the importance of Web masters by officially honoring these professionals with their own celebratory day. According to the press release, “if newspaper carriers, cartoonists, doctors and hairstylists all have their own day, it’s time for Web masters to receive the same recognition.”

We at VPS Host Reviews appreciate the effort on behalf of GoDaddy. Excellent idea. Finally, a holiday I can take seriously!

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High-reliability web hosting provider for businesses worldwide, ServInt, has performed major upgrades on its core line of Virtual Private Server (VPS) services, by increasing the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) allocated to its core line of VPS services.

Services in the upgrade include Essential VPS, Signature VPS and Ultimate VPS. Guaranteed RAM allocations on each of the core VPS services was increased by at least 128 MB. Upgrades will be automatically performed today for all existing ServInt VPS customers. The upgraded VPS services are also available now to new customers.

Last week, ServInt introduced the flagship product in its VPS line, SuperVPS, a fully redundant, enterprise-class hosting service. Each service in ServInt’s VPS line is a powerful replacement for the traditional dedicated server. Each offers customers increased redundancy while providing the same computing performance of a traditional dedicated server - with significant cost savings. These hosting services are ideal for small and medium-size web-based companies that demand a web-hosting service managed by experienced professionals.

This is the second stage of ServInt’s comprehensive overhaul of its VPS services. ServInt recently completed significant upgrades to bandwidth and disk-space allocations for its entire VPS line, benefiting both existing and new customers.

Christian Dawson, Vice President of Operations at ServInt remarked, ”The completion of the second stage of our VPS overhaul demonstrates our industry leadership and our commitment to offer the best possible VPS service value. We’ve invested millions of dollars in this overhaul and we are delighted to automatically include existing customers in our upgrade path.”

ServInt is a provider of high-reliability web hosting for businesses worldwide, offering Green IT services for its Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions. ServInt was founded in Northern Virginia in 1995 as one of the first web-hosting companies to offer a managed, dedicated server solution. From multiple world-class data centers, ServInt now provides its scalable suite of VPS, dedicated and enterprise-level server options to thousands of customers in more than 60 countries.