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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.
Perhaps all programmers working on professional database systems should have to get a professional qualification to show that they can write secure code. I wouldn't say the same should be manditory for things like usability or stability (except for special sensitive areas), but being able to write code that actually allows serious danger without qualification is pretty weird. Builders need qualifications, electricians do, gas installers do, ...
You're glad that you use pretty much the only langauge where this is not done automatically for you, but which instead forces you to use a function with a name like mysql_real_escape_string()? And that actually has a similarly-named function without the "_real_" that doesn't do the job right? Just kidding with that other one, here's the real one!