Website developers can protect users from internet-borne threats

Protecting users from internet-borne threats falls on trusted websites, says Overstock's Sam Peterson. Dan Kaplan reports.

Hobbyist Dan Thompson created a website in 2000 for music fans to discuss and trade lyrics of one-hit wonders – think “Come on Eileen” or “Ice, Ice Baby” – he never thought the site would become a cyber target.

But that's just what happened last month, when hackers launched injection attacks against the vulnerable site by inserting a simple, customised script into the URL string. This query manipulated the contents of the Structured Query Language (SQL) Server database – common on most dynamic websites – causing the comment sections below message board threads to disappear.

Luckily (and perhaps stupidly), the vandals failed to initiate their script tags, meaning the 5,000 daily visitors to Thompson's site were not silently redirected to a rogue China-based website that was included in the script. Had they been, there is a strong chance the machines of unpatched users would have been infected with a trojan.

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