Hackers in Eastern Europe used the SQL injection vulnerability to successfully break through the British Parliament's official website.

Recently, a Romanian hacker nicknamed "Unu" disclosed on his blog that he found an SQL injection vulnerability on the British Parliament's official website, which exposes a lot of confidential information, including unencrypted logon certificates. Using this vulnerability, he claims that as long as a database command is added to the webpage address in the browser, the related confidential data can be stolen from the website backend server. What's worse, the authorities are not satisfied with the awareness and response speed of this web page vulnerability.

 

 

 
This incident reflects at least two major problems of the website. First, the SQL injection vulnerability exists, and confidential data is not encrypted, but stored in plaintext, there are also many vulnerabilities in the passwords of website accounts. These passwords are easy to guess. One of the accounts with the username "fulera" is suspected to be Alex Fuller's account, which is currently a senior Website Creator on the British Parliament official website.

However, we do not know the severity of this leak. These accounts and passwords may have been abandoned for weeks or even months. The Council officials we contacted on Tuesday said they would conduct some investigation into the incident and then inform us of the findings.

In any case, the incident undoubtedly reflects the weak security awareness on the British Parliament's official website. Two weeks ago, the media reported that hackers used the same SQL injection vulnerability to attack some official U.S. websites. These incidents did not attract enough attention.

Even worse, within 48 hours after the vulnerability was cracked, the Unu, Softpedia, and Register websites have issued warnings in various forms, such as messages, texts, and phone numbers, the vulnerability was not fixed until Tuesday.