The Urban Sherpa - Tech Support Our Troops

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The Urban Sherpa keeps a collection of stories and curios filed under Mythic Proportions.

Tech Support Our Troops

May 25, 2010

Wargames

The people most interested in my blog this week are making repeated visits from Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I can't tell from looking at my analytics software which blog posts they like most. "Therapy" and "Page Not Found" are both popular.

But the visitors from Fort Huachuca, Arizona aren't much interested in reading, really.

Fort Huachuca, Arizona is home to the United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command, and it seems that this week, they've started basic training in "SQL injections"—a process by which a hacker tries to get at usernames and passwords and whatever else, by appending some computer code to the end of a page's URL:

http://site.com/article.php?id=9%20union%20select%20Username,0,1,2%20from%20admin

As the people at USAISEC surely know, it's prudent to add some simple protections to your website, to help prevent SQL injections: a tweak to the php.ini file, for instance, and an extra function to strip the most dubious keywords from the URL's string ($string = eregi_replace($badWords, "", $string);)

Whatever their motive, I'm glad the site's found new visitors! Welcome, USAISEC! Don't forget to "like" me on Facebook and "follow" me on Twitter! I hope you find some things here that you like, and I hope that my usernames and passwords are not among those things.

Thanks for keeping us safe.

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