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The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away

Accepted submission by Phoenix666 at 2015-11-25 14:38:08
Security

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 [vice.com] (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.


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