University of Washington Vulnerable and Database Leaked by Hacker
A few days back, a Team INTRA member hacked into the University of Washington database and released much data. Today, N0B0DY and N0LIFE hacked into it again, releasing the most recent passwords on Pastebin.
The root MySQL password was also released, as well as many other MySQL users. The information_schema database was accessed, and they released the COLUMNS table completely, having 6363 records. Hackers also expose the vulnerable links in Pastebin note.
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast.
The exposed vulnerabilities are of SQL injection. It is a technique used to take advantage of non-validated input vulnerabilities to pass SQL commands through a Web application for execution by a backend database. Attackers take advantage of the fact that programmers often chain together SQL commands with user-provided parameters, and can therefore embed SQL commands inside these parameters. The result is that the attacker can execute arbitrary SQL queries and/or commands on the backend database server through the Web application.
Many web developers are unaware of how SQL queries can be tampered with, and assume that an SQL query is a trusted command. It means that SQL queries are able to circumvent access controls, thereby bypassing standard authentication and authorization checks, and sometimes SQL queries even may allow access to host operating system level commands.
