Security

Ed Pollack
Sample form with validation errors that protect the underlying code from SQL injection attacks.

SQL Injection: Detection and prevention

August 30, 2019 by

Summary

With an understanding of what SQL injection is and why it is important to an organization, we can shift into a discussion of how to prevent it. We ultimately want systems where SQL injection is impossible or very difficult to pull off. We then want systems where exploiting bugs is slow, laborious, and likely to raise monitoring alarms within an organization when attempted. The trio of layered security, prevention, and alerting can provide an immense advantage against not only SQL injection, but other data security threats.

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Ed Pollack
Attempting to locate a SQL injection vulnerability by entering special characters into form fields.

SQL Injection: What is it? Causes and exploits

August 30, 2019 by

Summary

Many security vulnerabilities are discovered, patched, and go away forever. Some linger and continue to plague software development and will continue to do so for years to come. Setting aside social engineering and non-technical attacks, SQL injection remains one of the top security threats to our data, as well as one of the most misunderstood.

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Gauri Mahajan
Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database.

Vulnerability Assessment and Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database

June 17, 2019 by

In today’s time where data breaches are highly expected to happen, there is a high need to ensure sensitive data in the Azure SQL databases is secured and which is why data security implementation is gaining momentum across each community. We covered one of the features of Advanced Data Security here in Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification. Let’s dive further into the other two features that Azure SQL offers with this capability in this article.

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Gauri Mahajan
Columns classified using T-SQL in Data Discovery & Classification.

Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification

June 17, 2019 by

Azure SQL supports in building and managing wide range of SQL databases, tools, frameworks etc. on the cloud. Organizations are drifting towards Azure SQL because of its obvious advantages over on-premises SQL Server and are generating, exchanging and storing data at an exponential rate on Azure. It becomes essential to safeguard, monitor our sensitive data and get alerts on anomalous activities else companies may come under fire for letting data leak and hacked.

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Timothy Smith
Compare auditing Azure costs using self-auditng on the same App Service versus an independent server auditing

User Security and Risks to Azure Costs

May 16, 2019 by

We’ve looked at both the organization and development side of managing Azure costs. One risk we have is attackers who compromise an account and mis-scale resources (such as scaling up), driving up our costs. Another scenario is attackers scaling resources too low that affects client’s ability to do their work (performance problems) – a separate risk that may result in lower costs on the cloud side, but higher costs against our reputation. A third risk is reconnaissance of our Azure use: this allows the attackers to get information about our design and later make a wide range of attacks that will appear as normal to us – in this case, Azure costs may be only one of the impacts with other impacts being as severe.

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Timothy Smith

DevSecOps: Developing with Automated Security Testing

March 6, 2019 by

A key component of DevSecOps and identical to running unit tests to validate code after a build, running automated security testing after an application has been deployed (such as automated penetration tests) can provide us with a tool that identifies security risks. As we’ve seen recently, there’s been a growth of many companies experiencing information being compromised and with the development culture of “move fast and break things”, I expect this trend of successful attacks will continue. Before we look at our options for automating this testing, we want to be aware of its limits, evaluate the requirements, and consider common designs that are useful.

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Sifiso W. Ndlovu

How to Programmatically Pass Credentials in an Embedded Power BI Report

November 20, 2018 by

In the article, How to embed a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.Net web application, we looked at available options for embedding a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.NET web application. Since the publication of the article, I have received several questions relating to how one goes about programmatically passing credentials for report server connection within an embedded Power BI Report Server report. The simple answer to such questions is that it is currently not possible to implement user impersonation in an embedded Power BI Report Server. However, like in most scenarios, there are workarounds that one could temporarily employ – at least until Microsoft comes up with a permanent solution to what is becoming a top requested feature at ideas.powerbi.com.

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James Rhoat

Considerations and concerns when setting up Database mail for SQL Server

August 31, 2018 by

Database mail is widely used by DBAs and companies around the world and is one of the features of SQL Server that can be very important for startups. That is because it is a cheap solution for getting alerts from your SQL Server for potential hardware issues, early warning signs of corruption, along with potential resource constraints. However, it can be misused or pose potential security issues. Before we start, to my myself clear I am in favor of configuring Database mail for the DBA team when done properly. In the rest of the article, we will touch on some of the common mistakes people make with database mail and their SQL Servers. We will not discuss the setup of this feature as it was well documented by Bojan Petrovic on SQLShack.

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Timothy Smith

SQL Server security considerations with open source tools

June 21, 2018 by

As our company has grown, we’ve recently added developers to our team who want to use open source tools (open source languages and libraries). In the past, we built and used our own custom libraries, but our new developers to prefer to use open source libraries or add new languages that require new libraries. We’re concerned that the use of open source libraries may not be secure and may introduce new inputs and outputs in our system that we don’t fully understand. What should we consider when we think about allowing open source software, tools or languages in our environment from the standpoint of security? Read more »

Timothy Smith

Securing access for SQL Server auditing

May 21, 2018 by

Our organization must restrict permissions and prove to an independent party that we investigate access and restrict permissions. We restrict permissions to objects using least permissions and give full access to an exceptional few based on an organizational design that follows best practices. What can we do additionally that will help us prevent unauthorized access or catch when someone who shouldn’t have access is able to infiltrate our systems, especially in the context of showing a third party that we track this.

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server data security feature RLS (Row-Level Security) and GDPR

March 9, 2018 by

Of late, there’s been a lot of noise around the term, GDPR. Chances are, some of us even had to go through learning sessions targeted at IT professionals to learn about what this new standard of data protection means. GDPR is primarily a European privacy law which sets a new bar, globally, on privacy rights, compliance, and security. GDPR is mainly about protecting the rights of every individual, providing the individual with more control over his personal data. It dictates how data should be handled, managed and protected going forward, the individual’s choice being the prime focus.

Today, data is widespread; many corporations handle part of the data on the cloud and part of it on premises. Our focus being SQL Server, we shall talk about what capabilities Microsoft gives us in order to be compliant with these laws that come into effect on the 25th of May, 2018. We would have to modify our data handling procedures keeping the focus on the security of the data processing.

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Sifiso W. Ndlovu

Impact of CLR Strict Security configuration setting in SQL Server 2017

February 13, 2018 by

Every seasoned SQL Server developer will tell you that no matter how hard you try, there are just operations in SQL Server better implemented elsewhere than relying on native Transact-SQL language (T-SQL). Operations such as performing complex calculations, implementing regular expression checks and accessing external web service applications can easily lead to your SQL Server instance incurring significant performance overhead. Thankfully, through its common language runtime (CLR) feature, SQL Server provides developers with a platform to address some of the inconveniences of native T-SQL by supporting an import of assembly files produced from projects written in. Net programming languages (i.e. C#, VB.NET). I have personally found CLR to be very useful when it comes to splitting string characters into multiple delimited lines.

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Brian Lockwood

Using production data for testing in a post GDPR world

January 15, 2018 by

To SQL Server DBAs who are the shepherds of data in organizations, key GDPR questions, in general, center around whether data will need to be treated differently, safeguarded more etc. and specifically, as it relates to allowing production data to be used in testing.

That will be the focus of this article as we’ll work our way through the details of this regulation as well as various authoritative articles on the subject, to address this key question. Then we’ll look to ways and means to potentially ameliorate our findings to provide alternatives and workarounds if possible.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to configure Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2016 using SSMS, PowerShell and T-SQL

October 2, 2017 by

In an era of remote storage and retrieval of data, including the cloud, data security plays a vital role, especially since it’s vulnerable during the transit. Situations like database backup or copy from or to the cloud, there is always a risk of data exposure to outside world lurking around one corner or the other. We have seen a noticeable surge in the technologies around protection and security of data from the world full of unsafe hands. Efforts are being made to protect data at a very granular level of the encryption hierarchy. Protection of business data cannot be stressed upon more.

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Jefferson Elias

How to drop a role in a SQL Server Database

September 6, 2017 by

Introduction

Let’s say we have a database role that we don’t need anymore because we defined another security policy using another database role. What are the steps to follow in order to properly drop this database role? That’s the question this article will try to answer, covering as many cases as possible.

In the following article, we will consider the simple steps we can follow in order to do this task using both SSMS and T-SQL. Then, we will focus on some facts that will lead us to the conclusion that, if we do it this way, it won’t work every time. We will list some situations where it could fail and define a test case situation in order to create a stored procedure that will do the job correctly, in all cases bymanaging these situations.

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