Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

To build these applications and services, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.

 What is the Azure Services Platform?

Yep…It’s still going-and its worse than ever it seems. Hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people are stillstumbling across perfectly legitimate websites that have been compromised by an SQL injection, and as a result are infected with a nastyTrojan.
These types of Trojans are known for changing an affected system’s local DNS and Internet browser settings, thus making the system vulnerable for even more potential threats. (Trend Micro have written a very good post explaining what happens once infected)

Therefore I thought I would take some time to mention a dew domains (courtesy of f-secure) admins should block to avoid any possible chance of infection:

yl18.net

www.bluell.cn

www.kisswow.com.cn

www.ririwow.cn

winzipices.cn

www.wowgm1.cn

www.killwow1.cn

www.wowyeye.cn

vb008.cn

9i5t.cn

computershello.cn

This is a good time to again mention that this not a vulnerability in Microsoft IIS or Microsoft SQL that is used to make this happen. If you are an administrator of a website that is using ASP/ASP.NET, you should make sure that you sanitize all inputs before you allow it to access the database.

There are many articles on how to do this such as this one. You could also have a look at URLScanwhich provides an easy way to filter this particular attack based on the length

HEROES Happen {HERE}

Microsoft have just posted the resources from the Windows Server, SQL Server & Visual Studio Heroes happen {Here}  launch. Check them out they are very informative indeed!

Catergorys include:

• Session 1 | What’s New in Windows Server 2008
• Session 2 | Virtualization and Your Infrastructure
• Session 3 | Securing Your IT Infrastructure with Windows Server 2008
• Session 4 | Exploring Windows Server 2008 Web and Application Technologies

Find the links to the slides here: http://www.technetbriefings.com/2008-launch-resources.aspx