8,000 exposed in Slovak Chamber of Commerce and Industry hack

The official site of the Slovak Chamber of Commerce and Industry (scci.sk) got hacked and 8,000 users were affected, according to news reports.

Data such as names, phone numbers, hashed passwords, and emails, were leaked by a hacker dubbed Kapustkiy, a member of the New World Hackers group. He reportedly used SQL injection to exploit an existing site vulnerability and managed to get access to sensitive information.

The hacker said to have contacted the site”s administrators, but hasn”t received a response.

SQL injection is one of the most common techniques used to force a site into dumping data to an attacker. Yahoo, Sony, LinkedIn and other millions of web applications have suffered SQL injection attacks. Why? The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) offers a pretty good explanation:

SQL Injection attacks are unfortunately very common, and this is due to two factors: the prevalence of SQL Injection vulnerabilities and the attractiveness of the target (databases containing the interesting/critical data for the application),” OWASP says.

Plus, there are a lot of free available tools which even script-kiddies can access.

The first step towards better security is to scan websites and web applications with an automated web application security scanner. Developers also need to provide each web application only with the privileges it requires. Segregation and data encryption are also quite important, along with the sanitization of user input.