SQL Injection Attacks Increasing
An anonymous reader writes "Help Net Security has a story that covers the dramatic increase in the number of hacker attacks attempted against its banking, credit union and utility clients in the past three months using SQL Injection." Article follows up on press release with a little more information. Not a lot here shockingly surprising, but it's worth mentioning that SQL injection is a real pain for web developers. You have to be very careful about checking user input.
The only people who consider it a pain in the ass are people who are (a) lazy, (b) not adequately security-conscious, (c) programming without a framework that provides good tools to do this. The reason we have so many SQL injections is because we have legions of web programmers who were never taught how to write code in a hostile environment. Web programming is never presented in that light; it's always, "here's a quick little script that fetches twenty records from a database and displays them." Security is far too often a footnote or an appendix that beginning programmers never get to. Building apps for the web is not like doing your Data Structures I homework. You need a different mindset. It's a lot more like designing locks--for prisons full of inmates eager to get out.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.