Saturday, October 24, 2009

Four Ways to Minimize Exposure from SQL Injection

The average homeowner personal site has no idea what it feels like to be attacked. In fact, Web criminals tend to stay away from hacking projects that do not serve to their advantage. This does not mean that owners of these sites are safe because they are probably more vulnerable than most. One of the most likely threats and dangerous your site may be susceptible to attack by inference, more commonly known as the dreaded SQL injection. With this particular attack, the attacker usually inserts SQL code in a Web form or to change or access to critical information residing on a primary database. It has a become a major problem for dynamic websites that successful implementation could provide an attacker with access to a database or longer. This attack is very real and has directly assisted in the operation of some of the most famous sites on the Internet.

Viable SQL Injection Prevention Methods

To help protect you, we have identified four tested methods to enhance the security of your website against SQL injections.

1.) Make sure your forms and other web applications are designed with up to date, secure, compliant code. Also keep in mind that forms on your Web site does not accept user input to SQL queries without being thoroughly tested and challenged to security purposes. You can start by reducing the number and types of characters that can be accepted by a form. Do not leave you open to exposure as many other website owners who have nothing in place to prevent malicious or unexpected entries. If a hacker enters SQL commands rather than the user name and password should, those commands could be implemented and lead to many problems for your system.

2.) To ensure better protection against SQL injection, you should avoid dynamic queries wherever possible. These requests are placed on the Internet in clear text, which means they are likely to expose sensitive information such as logins, passwords and other confidential information. Because of the potential security risk, some experts recommend not to use dynamic queries at all.

3.) Leverage data encryption techniques. If your site includes the sharing of sensitive data such as numbers, credit card, social security numbers or bank account information must be protected with an encryption protocol such as SSL or TSL. If an attacker is able to affect the safety information they capture will be rendered useless because the encryption ensures that they can not read.

4.) Keep your system updated. Security is a full time job these days but, fortunately, most software bug fixes and vulnerabilities in their products as they become known. You may provide better protection against SQL injection, making sure that your SQL database and operating systems are patched regularly updated. If you do not have your own server, these are tasks that you must ensure that are managed by your hosting provider.

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