One of the hackers suspected of being behind the TalkTalk breach, which led to the personal details of at least 150,000 people being stolen, used a vulnerability discovered two years before he was even born.
That method of attack was SQL injection (SQLi), where hackers typically enter malicious commands into forms on a website to make it churn out juicy bits of data. It's been used to steal the personal details of World Health Organization employees, grab data from the Wall Street Journal, and hit the sites of US federal agencies.
"It's the most easy way to hack," the pseudonymous hacker w0rm, who was responsible for the Wall Street Journal hack, told Motherboard. The attack took only a "few hours."
But, for all its simplicity, as well as its effectiveness at siphoning the digital innards of corporations and governments alike, SQLi is relatively easy to defend against.
(Score: 1, Troll) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:20AM
let your coders do what they damn well please. Before deployment, encrypt all the queries. On the server, decrypt them. Change the key from time to time.
Even rot13 would suffice.
This would be a very simple patch to the middleware.
A very nice jazz combo just started playing here at the Starbucks in the Pearl District. The baristas all let me hang out here all night even if I don't buy anything, as I often do buy a coffee but usually don't have the cash. They all know that when I do buy coffee, I earned the money by singing on the street. Well tonight I'm just having a cup of water.
Good Times.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @08:51AM
let your coders do what they damn well please. Before deployment, encrypt all the queries. On the server, decrypt them.
How's that going to help? Encrypting "drop tables" then decrypting it and passing it to the server is still going to do "drop tables".