Benjamin’s Musings

Sql injection

My mom has always liked to make buttons.  It all started when she bought a button maker that you could use to make all sorts of buttons at home on your own time.  At first, she used it to make buttons for birthdays, as gifts, for events, and to give to relatives.  She was known as the “button lady” for a couple years, and eventually more and more people started to ask her to make buttons for special events or to make a whole batch of them as promotional items for their businesses.  She gladly agreed and would often stay up late at night making these buttons.  I remember being really fascinated as a kid, watching her carefully choose the colors, set the letters, place the button on the machine, and see it press down and pop out the final product. Fast forward with me several years to when the internet started to gain popularity.  My aunt was talking to my mom one day about web based businesses when she suggested that my mom sell her buttons online.  She had gotten quite good at them, and had some very unique designs that would appeal to people outside the small community of her acquaintances.  My mom started a rudimentary website and started to sell her buttons.  Today, she has a medium-sized button selling business online.  It wasn’t as hugely popular as we expected, but it provides her a flexible, about 30-hours-per-week job doing something that she likes and is good at.  I always used the website to off-handedly brag to my friends about my mom’s business.   One of my friends saw my mom’s website and commented that the shopping cart page needed to be more secure.  He suggested using a security scanner to check for security leaks that might be vulnerable to attacks such as sql injection.  Sql what?  I was as lost as you probably are when I heard this strange phrase.  Basically, sql (structured query language) is used by many websites to allow outsiders to access deeper parts of the website.  This is what happens whenever people use the shopping cart or discussion forum aspects of websites.  The problems start when hackers can use sql injection to gain greater access to other parts of the website to disrupt it or glean information.  This is why a security scanner would be useful to see if it’s vulnerable to such attacks, and I promptly suggested my mom to secure her site.  This way she can focus on making more buttons that people love!