How to Check for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

How to Check for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

Securing your website and web applications from SQL Injection involves a three-part process:

1. Analysing the present state of security present by performing a thorough audit of your website and web applications for SQL Injection and other hacking vulnerabilities.

2. Making sure that you use coding best practice santising your web applications and all other components of your IT infrastructure.

3. Regularly performing a web security audit after each change and addition to your web components.

Furthermore, the principles you need to keep in mind when checking for SQL Injection and all other hacking techniques are the following: “Which parts of a website we thought are secure are open to hack attacks?” and “what data can we throw at an application to cause it to perform something it shouldn’t do?”.

Checking for SQL Injection vulnerabilities involves auditing your website and web applications. Manual vulnerability auditing is complex and very time-consuming. It also demands a high-level of expertise and the ability to keep track of considerable volumes of code and of all the latest tricks of the hacker’s ‘trade’.

The best way to check whether your web site and applications are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks is by using an automated and heuristic web vulnerability scanner.

An automated web vulnerability scanner crawls your entire website and should automatically check for vulnerabilities to SQL Injection attacks. It will indicate which URLs/scripts are vulnerable to SQL injection so that you can immediately fix the code. Besides SQL injection vulnerabilities a web application scanner will also check for Cross site scripting and other web vulnerabilities.