Understanding injection-based attacks

Injection-based attacks allow threat actors and penetration testers to inject customized code into an input field within a form on a web application. The web application will process the input and provide a response, as it is designed to operate in a client-server model and a request-response model too. However, if a user submits malformed code to a login form on a web application, the user may be able to retrieve sensitive information from the web application and the database server, and even perform operations on the host operating system that’s running the vulnerable web application.

Without proper validation and sanitization of users’ input, threat actors are able to determine whether a web application has security vulnerabilities, manipulate the data stored within the backend database server, and even perform command-injection attacks on the host operating system.

Let’s consider a targeted web application that...