Lesson 7 of 12By Shruti M
Last updated on Mar 31, 20212244In today’s world where technology is booming, web hacking techniques are becoming popular, especially the ones that can destroy your applications. SQL Injection is one such technique that can attack data-driven applications. In this article, you will see what SQL Injection is, and how SQL Injection uses malicious SQL codes to access information that can destroy your database.
The following topics will be covered in this article:
SQL Injection is a code-based vulnerability that allows an attacker to read and access sensitive data from the database. Attackers can bypass security measures of applications and use SQL queries to modify, add, update, or delete records in a database. A successful SQL injection attack can badly affect websites or web applications using relational databases such as MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. In recent years, there have been many security breaches that resulted from SQL injection attacks.
With this basic understanding of ‘what is SQL Injection’, you will now look at the different types of SQL Injection.
In-band SQLi - The attackers use the same communication channel to launch their attacks and collect results.
The two common types of in-band SQL injections are Error-based SQL injection and Union-based SQL injection.
Blind SQLi - Here, it does not transfer the data via the web application. The attacker can not see the result of an attack in-band.
Out-of-bound SQL Injection - Out-of-bound is not so popular, as it depends on the features that are enabled on the database server being used by the web applications. It can be like a misconfiguration error by the database administrator.
Now, it’s time to understand another important topic in this article titled ‘What is SQL Injection’, i.e., how to prevent SQL injection?
A website has three major components - Frontend, Backend, and Database.
At the frontend, a website is designed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. At the backend, you have scripting languages such as Python, PHP, Perl, etc. The server side has databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server, to execute the queries.
When you write a query, you generally send a get request to the website. Then, you receive a response from the website with HTML code.
Using the Postman API tool, you can test the responses that you get from various websites.
This application has been developed by the Open Web Application Security Project that periodically releases the top 10 risks that an application will face for a particular year. It has a collection of vulnerable web apps that are distributed on a Virtual Machine.
This project has in-built vulnerabilities for learners and professionals to practice and develop their skills on how SQL injection works.
Note: Performing SQL Injection in the real-world on any website is illegal.
You will find training applications, and realistic, intentionally vulnerable applications.
You can also find old versions of real applications and much more.
For the demonstration, you’ll be using the OWASP Mutillidae II application.
On the left, you can see the OWASP top 10 risks for 2013, 2010, and 2007.
Click on SQLi - Bypass Authentication > Login
You will enter a regular login authentication page that any application may ask for.
Suppose you enter an anonymous username and password, that won’t allow you to log in.
Let’s write an SQL statement in the username and try to login again.
The single quote (‘) is an operator that goes to the database server, selects the default user tables, and compares it to the condition that is given. That condition that you gave was 1=1, which is always true. So, it selected the default user table that was available in the database, and instead of comparing it to a password, it compared it to the condition.
If you give a false condition like 1=2, you will get an error message “Account does not exist”.
Now, that you have looked at a demonstration on how an SQL query can be used to login to an application, let’s understand the last topic in this article on ‘what is SQL Injection’.
Some of the other methods used to prevent SQL Injection are:
SQL Injection attacks can exploit an organization’s database and control a database server behind a web application. After reading this article, you explored ‘what is SQL injection’ and its types. You looked at a demonstration using the OWASP application and learned how to prevent SQL Injection.
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Do you have any questions related to this article? If you do, then please put them in the comments section of this article. Our team will help you solve your queries.
To learn more, click on the following link: SQL Injection
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Shruti is an engineer and a technophile. She works on several trending technologies. Her hobbies include reading, dancing and learning new languages. Currently, she is learning the Japanese language.
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