The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes with this history of SQL injection attacks. From the Motherboard article: "SQL injection (SQLi) is where hackers typically enter malicious commands into forms on a website to make it churn out juicy bits of data. It's been used to steal the personal details of World Health Organization employees, grab data from the Wall Street Journal, and hit the sites of US federal agencies. 'It's the most easy way to hack,' the pseudonymous hacker w0rm, who was responsible for the Wall Street Journal hack, told Motherboard. The attack took only a 'few hours.' But, for all its simplicity, as well as its effectiveness at siphoning the digital innards of corporations and governments alike, SQLi is relatively easy to defend against. So why, in 2015, is SQLi still leading to some of the biggest breaches around?"

Comments

Re:Everyone has to learn about it.

[Rei]

Even older programmers do it - I discovered just last Friday that a senior programmer I work with had written a service that was vulnerable to SQL injection (purely by accident, I was using it and noticed how it was mishandling apostrophes).

I think most programmers will do it sooner or later until either they've A) internalized the warnings from others, or B) been caught by someone noticing (and potentially exploiting) vulnerable code that they've written. And if neither A) nor B) happen immediately, they may well be serial abusers.

Also a lot of programmers seem to forget that injection doesn't just apply to SQL. Shell command insertion is also a huge abuse target.

PHP

[Bogtha]

So why, in 2015, is SQLi still leading to some of the biggest breaches around?

Because typical PHP tutorials still teach old, broken ways of doing things and this shows no signs of abating. Go ahead and search the web for things like php mysql tutorial. The top hits are crap like this, written by incompetent developers who don't know what they are doing. PHP developers learn from crap like that, then they go on to write their own tutorials that are the same or worse.

And before you start, yes, this is something where PHP is stand-out bad. Go ahead and try the same searches with other languages. There is a vast difference in quality of learning materials. I mean, PHP had XSS vulnerabilities in its official tutorials until relatively recently. Newbies don't stand a chance in those circumstances.

I just don't get how it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

You are absolutely right. I see this all the time as the hiring manager in a web shop. I always present candidates with this question:

1. Find and fix the potential SQL injection vulnerability: // .. /*@var \PDO */
protected $dbh; //..
public function getOption($name)
        $sql = "SELECT val FROM options WHERE name = {$name}";
        $stmt = $this->dbh->prepare($sql);
        $stmt->execute();
        return $stmt->fetchColumn();
}

For those who don't know PHP, the answer is:
        $sql = "SELECT val FROM options WHERE name = ?";
        $stmt = $this->dbh->prepare($sql);
        $stmt->execute(array($name));

Almost no candidates out of school even know what I'm asking them to do. About half of people with experience get it right; a quarter of them understand the question and get it wrong, and a quarter don't understand the question. I find that it doesn't matter how many years of experience they have, about a quarter of programmers just don't understand what SQL injection is.

I just don't get it. I've spent more than a decade programming in PHP, the language that really made SQL injection a thing because it lacked prepared statements for a long, long time and even then a lot of the input escaping functions were broken. Over those years, I've picked up a lot of bad habits; some were dictated by the shortcomings of PHP4 ("dependency injection? what's that?"), others are a side effect of spending all of my time cranking out single purpose scripts that had to work yesterday ("Ctrl+C; ctrl+V").

Nevertheless, it still blows my my mind when I encounter people in this day and age who aren't using prepared statements. Concatenating SQL is just so... messy. Seriously, it takes two minutes to write a nice, clean, understandable SQL statement as a string, and at most a three line loop to bind the values. If your are concatenating it together, you have a mess of loops and conditions (comma here?) and strings and array manipulations... It is so much more work.

Yet I still hire jokers who can't do it because I need bodies to fill seats.

Re:Everyone has to learn about it.

[i.r.id10t]

As soon as PHP totally gets rid of the mysql_ family of functions, and forces everyone to convert to mysqli function/objects or PDO, it will fix itself. As a bonus, quite a few folks may make some beer money fixing all of the suddenly broken scripts...

The problem with search results is that the mysql_ functions for a loong time were the only way to do the task, and with the plethora of tutorials/information out there the sheer number of them overwhelm the "new" stuff (mysqli and/or PDO)