Ethical Hacking

12STEALING AND CRACKING PASSWORDS

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, For the want of a horse the rider was lost, For the want of a rider the battle was lost, For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.

–Benjamin Franklin

Hackers often compromise websites and APIs by finding ways to inject their own code. This chapter will introduce you to one of these techniques, called SQL injection, and you will use it to extract a database of usernames and passwords from a web server. As a security measure, servers often store hashes of the passwords instead of plaintext ...