Stormrider wrote:I am not happy for several reasons. How could their security fail and no one noticed it for several months? I still think they are still down playing the threat. The thieves may have had access to our addresses and DOB. They really should be telling people watch your credit reports like a hawk. Fraudulent charges on your credit card are easy to spot. Identity theft and new credit cards that get opened fraudulently in your name using your stolen DOB is not so easy to spot.
Just offering my opinion from someone who's got a lot of experience with this ...
Imagine SQL injections are similar to a computer virus of some sort ... you usually don't know if your computer has a virus, you usually don't know that someone is taking advantages of SQL injections until
after something bad happens. In one scenario, someone finds a weakness in the site's code by manipulating the URL where variables are being passed (such as a transaction ID, a user ID, a store order ID, etc.). They are able to insert a malicious command into the code because the programmer didn't verify that the variable was an integer or didn't include various characters that shouldn't be passed to the query. I know how to prevent it in my code, but I might not be able to best explain in layman's terms.
Wikipedia has a great explanation / summary ...
(I've always said "see-kwell" for SQL, but it is often pronounced by it's letters S-Q-L)An SQL injection is often used to attack the security of a website by inputting SQL statements in a web form to get a poorly designed website to perform operations on the database (often to dump the database content to the attacker) other than the usual operations as intended by the designer. SQL injection is a code injection technique that exploits a security vulnerability in a website's software. The vulnerability happens when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL commands are thus injected from the web form into the database of an application (like queries) to change the database content or dump the database information like credit card or passwords to the attacker. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.
Wikipedia's article can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql_injection