Businesses and developers around the world use PHP to power dynamic websites and scalable web applications. As web servers are publicly accessible, security must be a priority throughout the development process. Businesses investing in secure digital solutions often rely on professional Web App Development Services to build robust applications that follow industry-standard security practices. While PHP is a stable, flexible, and cost-effective platform, developers and administrators must take proactive measures to protect applications from potential security threats.
PHP is a stable and inexpensive web application platform. Like other web-based platforms, PHP is vulnerable to external attacks too. For this, developers, database architects, and system administrators should take measurable precautions before deploying any PHP applications to a live server. Most of these security techniques require only small code additions or simple adjustments to application settings.
Key Takeaways:
SQL injection is the most common hacking type and specifically targets database-driven websites or web applications that link or interact with databases. In SQL injection attacks, hackers exploit weak input validation to run malicious SQL queries that can modify, damage, or wipe out database contents.
This type of attack occurs when the developers fail to check data validation functionality in those sections of a website that accept and handle data from external sources. This allows attackers to add unauthorized SQL statements into insecure queries that rely on user-provided data for database operations.
For example:
An unprotected statement would be something like this
| 1 | $query = “SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘niki’”; |
An SQL injection query will result in the following attempt:
| 1 | $query = “SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ” or ’1=1′”; |
The result generated here will be true, and thus the entire contents of the users table would be displayed.
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In SQL injection, attackers gain access to all the information in the database, such as passwords, usernames, emails, and some other sensitive information.
Remote File Inclusion and Remote Code Execution
Violating this security measure will allow a malicious or even an unknown third party to run any code on the web server or on the client side, and can even lead to other hacking attempts.
Remote file inclusion is caused by a website vulnerability that allows hackers to deploy malicious files on the web server. This can happen because of improper use of require() and include() functions if the register_globals directive is ON, allowing the user to initialize variables remotely. These remote variables can be used to load malicious or unwanted files from remote sources, and if allow_url_fopen is enabled in php.ini, then remote files can also be uploaded to the server via FTP or HTTP from any external sources or any remote location.
Cross-Site Scripting is one of the most common forms of hacking. Attackers take advantage of security flaws in trusted sites to manipulate the system behavior of the site to do certain things. In XSS, the hacker infects a web page with a malicious client-side script, and whenever a user visits that page, the script gets downloaded into the attacker’s browser and executed. The pattern of an XSS attack is depicted in the diagram below:
Session and cookie hacking can’t violate the database or the web application itself, but they can affect user accounts. A session is an entity triggered when users establish contact with any web server and consists of some period of interaction between users and a web application, which may be authenticated using security measures like a username and password. In all these sessions, the web application stores a cookie or file on the user’s browser, which contains information about the session, such as users’ settings, authentication information, unique tokens, and shopping cart details, along with additional data.
Directory, aka Path traversal, is a method of destroying web applications by accessing the files from the document root directory, which enables attackers to access restricted files and interact with the web server by executing commands. These hacking attacks happen from the browser and are done by entering a URL into the address bar, which helps navigate out of the root directory and enter the main server directories. This attack can also be executed through front-end input forms of the web application.
Security isn’t something to think about after the fact. Every PHP application, big or small, needs it built in from the ground up. Catching vulnerabilities early and putting the right measures in place is what keeps your data safe and your users protected.
Arpatech specializes in building secure, reliable PHP applications that perform. Start your project with us today.
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