networking help

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Best practices for preventing SQL injection attacks on the network .

The first is to conduct an inventory of what you have as far as databases go, and understand their connections to applications. “Many companies are completely unaware of some of the databases in their environment,” says Sabo. “And even if they know about all their databases, often what happens is the database is being exposed on network segments that it’s not supposed to be exposed on. This is not a database problem per se, but a networking problem.”

For example, Sabo says a company might bring up a database in a test environment and then forget to close it down at the end of testing. Often that database might have default passwords, and sometimes it has real data. Developers do this sort of thing because they want to stress test the application and they use real rather than fake data because they think no one will ever see it.

Then there is the mapping issue. What applications are mapped to the database, and are they the correct ones? “Maybe for a test, a production database was connected up to a test database for a short while and then the connection was left by accident. Or a production database is mapped to an application that was retired, or that no one knows about. These things happen,” says Sabo. “So our first best practice is to provide visibility and an inventory into what databases you have and what they are mapped to.”

The next step is to continuously monitor what is going on between your application and the database. This is actually a recommendation from NIST. You will want to know if there is any rogue traffic going on there. This is where you look for SQL injections because you see the real SQL going across. There are tools that continuously monitor this traffic and detect if there is an unauthorized attempt at modifying data or getting data out.

And finally, the last best practice is to protect the database network with data loss prevention tools. “If you start to see credit card information coming out over the network and you know it shouldn’t be coming out that way, you know there is a problem,” says Sabo.

REFERENCES

http://www.securiteam.com/securityreviews/5DP0N1P76E.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection

http://ferruh.mavituna.com/sql-injection-cheatsheet-oku/

http://pentestmonkey.net/cheat-sheet/sql-injection/mysql-sql-injection-cheat-sheet