Skip to Content
The Oracle® Hacker's Handbook: Hacking and Defending Oracle
book

The Oracle® Hacker's Handbook: Hacking and Defending Oracle

by David Litchfield
January 2007
Intermediate to advanced
190 pages
3h 47m
English
Wiley
Content preview from The Oracle® Hacker's Handbook: Hacking and Defending Oracle

Oracle and Security

In June of 1997, Larry Ellison and Robert Miner founded a company called Software Development Labs. Both had worked together at Ampex; Robert had been Larry's supervisor. Together they had a vision, inspired by the work of Edgar Codd. Codd worked as a researcher for IBM and developed ideas for relational database systems. In 1970 he published a paper entitled "Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." While IBM was slow to see the potential of Codd's ideas, Larry and Robert were not. They changed their company's name to Relational Software, Inc., in 1979, and not long after that it again underwent a name change—becoming Oracle. "Oracle" had been the code name for a CIA project that both Larry and Robert had worked on while at Ampex. Indeed, by all accounts, in the early years, the biggest consumers of Oracle's software was the CIA and the NSA. Given this, one would assume that security would have been at the top of Oracle's agenda.

In 1999 Oracle started to gain the attention of the security research community. The first public record of a security bug in Oracle, according to SecurityFocus.com, was on April 29 of that year: Dan Sugalski posted that the oratclsh program was setuid root and executable by the *nix group, "others". This meant that anyone could run TCL scripts as the root user. Not long after this a number of flaws were revealed relating to the Oracle Web Listener, posted by the author and Georgi Guninski, as well as additional problems ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

David Litchfield, Chris Anley, John Heasman, Bill Grindlay
Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, Second Edition

Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, Second Edition

William R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, Aviel D. Rubin
Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hacker's Handbook, Fifth Edition, 5th Edition

Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hacker's Handbook, Fifth Edition, 5th Edition

Daniel Regalado, Shon Harris, Allen Harper, Chris Eagle, Jonathan Ness, Branko Spasojevic, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims
Linux Server Hacks

Linux Server Hacks

Rob Flickenger

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470080221Purchase book