How Prevalent Are SQL Injection Vulnerabilities?

Krishna Dagli writes to tell us of an investigation, by Michael Sutton, attempting to get an estimate of how widespread SQL-injection vulnerabilities are among Web sites. Sutton made clever use of the Google API to turn up candidate vulnerable sites. You might quibble with his methodology (some posters on the blog site do), but he found that around 11% of sites are potentially vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. He believes the causes for this somewhat alarming situation include development texts that teach programmers insecure SQL syntax, and point-and-click tools that allow the untrained to put up database-backed sites.

Comments

Moo

[Chacham]

Blame MySQL.

MySQL is not a database. It does not support Transactions. It doesn't use normal syntax. Why? Because it's easy. So a programmer who has better things to do than learning some arcane syntax can just get the job done and move on. Good? No!

It is because of this laziness that such attacks occur by someone who did take the time to learn the syntax. If people want a quick and dirty solution, so be it, but don't pretend to be a database and open all sorts or vulnerabilities.

The ease of SQL is made for people who take the time to learn it, and naturally code it securely. For those who don't have the time, just don't use SQL.

So, i blame MySQL (and its ilk) for this. And i can only laugh at the sites that get attacked because of their own laziness.