Hacker Used SQL-injection to Get 675K Credit Card

A computer hacker from Georgia has pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft after authorities found him with more than 675,000 stolen credit card accounts on his home computers, Credit card companies have traced more than $36 million in fraudulent transactions to the accounts that were breached by Rogelio Hackett.

How he did it? Hacker briefly used the SQL-injection attack on web resources he was able to use different SQL vulnerabilities despite that this kind of vulnerability is well known. SQL injection is one of the popular attacks on web application’s backend database it is not like XSS vulnerability where attacker uses JavaScript to target the client browser, SQL injection targets the SQL statement being executed by the application on the backend database.

Hackers usually identify the SQL injection vulnerability by adding invalid or unexpected characters to a parameter value and watch for errors in application’s response. For example:

http://www.example.com/users.asp?id=mark’

If the request generates an error, it is a good indication of a mishandled quotation mark and the application may be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. While I think that automated tools can do fast job in checking these vulnerabilities such as Havij a very fast tool that helps penetration testers to find and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities on a web page.

Attack with SQL-code uses poorly written Web-based applications that directly write data into the database. In fact, SQL-injection does not depend on application language as mistakes in programming allow SQL-injection use almost any programming language.

That’s why it is very important to conduct Application black-box penetration testing as this can reveal OWASP Top 10 application vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, parameter manipulation, cookie poisoning, and XSS.

An attacker who wishes to grab usernames and passwords might try phishing and social engineering attacks against some user’s application. On the other hand, Hackers can try to pull everyone’s credentials directly from the database.