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

The abuse of SQL injection

[Reality Master 201]

destroys thousands of lives a year. Sure, it starts small - a SELECT there, a few INSERTS on the weekend. Eventually, though, you're using stored procedures and trying to score triggers in the middle of the night.

Just say no, kids.

Simple solution

[CastrTroy]

The simple solution is to use parameterized queries. I don't know why more books don't know why more books don't push this methodology, as it makes you program faster, easier to read, and also makes you invulnerable to SQL injection attacks.