SQL Injection (SQLi) is one of the most how can you protect yourself from social engineering cyber awareness 2023  cyberattacks. It involves a hacker using malicious code that they insert into your page’s input, typically through a registration form. The code they add can then cause an attack on your database.

A successful SQLi attack can expose back-end data that was never meant to be exposed, such as sensitive corporate information, subscriber lists and confidential consumer details. This can have a significant impact on a company’s operations, as it could lead to the assailant reading illegal user lists, deleting columns or even gaining admin access to your entire database – all of which would be extremely damaging for any organization.

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There’s really no limit to what a malicious actor can do with a sqli attack, depending on the vulnerabilities that were exploited and the security measures that weren’t put in place to prevent these attacks. Some examples include login bypass (where a hacker alters a query to get around authentication), undermining application logic, union attacks, which allow the attacker to retrieve the results of multiple SELECT queries in a single statement, and more.

Other attacks include Boolean-based injections that send a SQL command to the database that returns True or False, allowing a cybercriminal to determine whether a specific page is live or not. And there are also Error-based SQLi attacks, which rely on error messages thrown by the database to gain information about its structure, like the number of tables and their elements.