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How dunnit plot gets scripted

Published Wednesday 16th April 2008 13:42 GMT

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Err... 

By Matthew
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 13:48 GMT

Twelve Monkeys, I think you'll find.

Umm.. 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 14:13 GMT
Paris Hilton

Perhaps it's Twelve Monkees?

Paris because:

Bruce Willis was in Twelve Monkeys

Bruce Willis was in Rugrats Go Wild (2003) with Elizabeth Daily

Elizabeth Daily was in Pledge This! (2006) with Paris Hilton

via oracleofbacon.org

Twelve Monkies 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 14:26 GMT
Coat

He may have been referring to a completely unrelated Shaolin Kung Fu movie

Twelve Monkeys 

By Nicholas Moore
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 14:39 GMT

I love the way John has linked to a page all about the film, yet still manages to misspell the films title!

SQL injection 

By Matt
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 14:41 GMT

If you use stored procedures and don't give the web site user access to the raw tables there can be no SQL injection!

Re: Twelve Monkeys 

By Sarah Bee
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 14:49 GMT
staff

I love the way you made a mistake while pointing out someone else's mistake. Grammar karma in action.

Grammar karma 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:07 GMT
Coat

"I love the way you made a mistake while pointing out someone else's mistake. Grammar karma in action."

i belive the miss take was intentional to add sat tyre to the post.....

mine is the one with the dictionary in the pocket

Gramma Karma 

By Mark Otway
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:07 GMT

Spelling and Punctuation karma, surely? ;)

</pedant>

Grammerer Karma 

By Anonymously Deflowered
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:25 GMT
Alert

May Pedantry Karma strike you all down!

It's called Skitts law! 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:28 GMT
Joke

If you correct peoples gramer you is bound to make a mishtake!

Re: Grammerer Karma 

By Dennis
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:46 GMT
Coat

Q: Who was the leader of the Pedants' Revolt?

A: Which Tyler.

@Matt Re: <b>SQL,</b> injection 

By Robert Forsyth
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 15:54 GMT

Not true.

Injection can work by using a input value that is displayed (without sanitizing it).

Say you had a comments application, that had three inputs: Title, Author, and Comment. And say when you press submit on the entry form the input values are stored verbatim, when the comment is displayed, say the author field just has "by " added to the beginning and is sent to the browser. Now say, someone inputs a script tag as the author, the browser will, instead of displaying the author, run the script.

Stored procedures does protect you from someone replacing a password input with a SQL script select statement to get the password from the database, assuming you can get enough details of the database structure from the error messages that appear in the browser (or it is a standard structure database).

don't be lazy 

By Ainteenbooty
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 16:08 GMT
IT Angle

The only reliable protection against SQL-injection is sever-side validation. Check the content and length of input strings before passing along to the database. Anything less is just lazy.

I think you'll find it's... 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 16:29 GMT
Paris Hilton

Spolling errers and grandma problems, I think you'll find!

Paris, because of all the wonderful things she's brought to the English language.

untitled 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 17:55 GMT

@ Robert "little knowledge is dangerous" Forsyth

ROFL... read a book dude...what you describe would not be an SQLi... and..

"Stored procedures does protect you from someone blah blah blah....". Again, read a book

@Sarah Bee 

By Nicholas Moore
Posted Wednesday 16th April 2008 21:50 GMT

I shall remember to use apostrophes for possession.

I shall remember to use apostrophes for possession.

I shall remember to use apostrophes for possession...

And as Mark correctly pointed out, it was punctuation karma biting me on the arse :) (aka "Pedantry to the rescue!")

So.. what can we do? 

By A
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 00:08 GMT

I've been scanning my sites for this..

The evidence for the malware I picked up, were malicious iframe's linked to javascripts appended to every index.html and index.php (even if the name started with something else)

grep -i -r -H -n --binary-files=without-match --colour=auto -U iframe /path/to/site/* > ~/tmp.txt && grep -i fromCharCode ~/tmp.txt > ~/results.txt

Just delete the iframe and script code to clean your code.. don't know how to prevent it though.. anyone?

@Nicholas - More Pedantry 

By Steven Knox
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 03:48 GMT
Boffin

"I love the way John _has_linked_ to a page all about the film, yet _still_manages_ to misspell the films title!"

I believe that you'll find that tense misalignment is a grammatical error. Try "has linked...has still managed" or "links...still manages" -- or follow Sara's example and use "has linked...while still managing".

PS - Don't mess with Sara. She's the best Vulture Central's got (and surely vastly underpaid)!

PPS - To those which hate the constant pedants' wars: I agree, but pedantry is like crack to some of us -- specifically those of us who actually cling to the horribly unlikely dream that someday humankind will create a language (or anything, for that matter) that is logically consistent and easy to use.

html encode 

By Unlimited
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 07:21 GMT

"don't know how to prevent it though.. anyone"

1. sanitise user input on the way in

2. html encode it on the way out. most web languages have a function for this, e.g. php has htmlspecialchars

@Robert Forsyth 

By Matt
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 08:23 GMT

Yes, you're right, stored procedures protect the database from the user gaining unauthorised access to the data, but they don't necessarily protect you from people inserting html it entered values.

@Matt 

By Unlimited
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 09:10 GMT

I take it you've never seen a proc like this:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[myproc] @sql varchar(8000)

EXEC(@sql)

Moral of the story: _Anything_ can be misused / written badly / insecure

I'm here about some monkeys. .. :) 

By Doug
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 20:13 GMT

Hi John, it's me again ...

"With the benefit of the hacker tool used to pull off the attack this all becomes much clearer, much like it was easier for scientists to unravel a cure for the mystery pandemic that blighted mankind in the Twelve Monkies after they obtained a sample of the pure source"

No, the above is a description of an SQL injection exploit, the latter is a ludicrous plot from a movie ..

Like, why didn't they send him back before the outbreak with a very contagious antidote virus to the first virus, that way he would have innoculate the population in advance. That way, him getting amnesia for half the picture and wandering around wondering what to do, wouldn't matter.

Wait a minute, I have an idea, why don't SANS send someone back in time to get a sample of the original malware. I'm available and after a life time of overindulging in chemicals, is suffering from amnesia already, just wait a minute, who wrote that already, voodoo mannn ???

@ Unlimited 

By A
Posted Thursday 17th April 2008 21:44 GMT
Coat

Ok,

But what if you have inherited a couple of thousand php files and don't want to rewrite Invision Power Board.. for a non-profit org where you volunteer..

should be an option in apache

mod_xss disable

mod_sqli disable

mod_malware disable

mines the lazy Nehru Jacket..

But the scientists didn't find a cure... 

By Brian Miller
Posted Friday 18th April 2008 01:09 GMT

They tried to have James Cole kill the end-of-world microbiologist who originally released the viruses. Remember the airport scene? Cole was gunned down, and after one of the tubes had been opened.

@A 

By Unlimited
Posted Friday 18th April 2008 12:43 GMT

You may want to look into mod_security

http://www.modsecurity.org/projects/modsecurity/apache/index.html

Hey Thanks! 

By A
Posted Monday 21st April 2008 02:52 GMT
Happy

Thats just what I was looking for, will have to learn it, use it, and spread it myself!

Thank you very much.

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