What is a SQL Injection?
When your website is data-driven, SQL Injection can become an attack vector of immense consequence. Through its vulnerabilities, attackers gain the ability to inject code directly into your database control plane in order to execute commands they would have difficulty doing otherwise. A successful attack could allow attackers access to user lists, table deletion or even gain administrative access for further attacks on your database server.
SQL Injection vulnerabilities typically arise when an attacker manipulates web form input to inject SQL statements directly into an insecure backend database, bypassing authentication and authorization procedures of a website. By injecting SQL statements directly into this vulnerable backend database, an attacker gains access to sensitive customer data typically not available publicly such as their name, email address and password that otherwise would remain protected – potentially giving them access to information such as customer names, emails addresses and passwords that may otherwise not be visible publicly; depending on their business type and web application this data could also be used for phishing attacks, fraud identity theft and other forms of criminal activity.
Attackers scan the Internet, campus networks and corporate intranets in search of SQL Injection vulnerabilities. With appropriate tools, attackers can identify many of these flaws and exploit them either financially or to steal personally identifiable information for other uses – including identity theft and credit card fraud.
As important as Least Privilege may be in deterring these attacks, the best defense is runtime application self-protection (RASP). RASP solutions embed security directly into software using instrumentation to filter user input before it enters databases – providing instantaneous user verification while eliminating missed attacks altogether. With RASP solutions being highly accurate in protecting against such threats and not incurring false positives triage times; their results also reduce triage and diagnosis time costs significantly while mitigating risk by eliminating false positives that consume time triage/diagnosis or diagnose unnecessary triage/diagnosis costs; all factors contributing to missed attacks by missing attacks occurring elsewhere within organizations compared with just using Least Privilege enforcement methods alone.
To prevent SQL Injection, it is crucial to sanitize all input and utilize parameterized queries effectively. These techniques only work if your string that contains input is hard-coded rather than dynamic and doesn’t include variable data that attackers could exploit to insert additional operations. String concatenation makes this easy for attackers who may then exploit any weaknesses to escape escaping characters and inject extra SQL operations into your query.
Developers should treat all user input, even that from authenticated users and internal employees, with suspicion. Filters based on blacklists often provide no effective protection; whitelisting trusted values would prevent injection of unapproved code. Furthermore, using modern development environments and languages that feature built-in protection against SQL Injection will give your team greater assurance that any code they are testing does not contain SQL Injection flaws.