SQL Injection

SQL injection is a very common and straight-forward website attack that can help hackers to expose a website database. With SQL injection we can execute unintended commands against website databases (many websites use SQL databases). Using SQL injection a hacker can become the database administrator and tamper with user data.

Typically,  the hackers use input fields on website to inject SQL.  For example, a form uses SQL to check the user’s account in the database – login, checkout , registration or contact forms. Any form on a website can be exploited during the SQL injection attempts.

The website can reject the suspicious form data by cleaning/sanitizing the input. That means ensuring that inputs don’t contain certain symbols, rejecting whitespace characters and using regular expressions to validate data. There are many characters that a hacker can use to exploit input

The best defense against SQL injection is to use parameterized SQL (prepared SQL). Parameters are placeholders and ensure input is safely used in SQL. They are interpreted by the database drivers.

There a lot of scripts to automate the SQL injection attacks.