Short post, high signal-to-noise. If you're using Burp Suite for web security testing, there are two extensions we install on every fresh Burp installation before doing anything else. Both are free, both are in the official BApp Store, both take about thirty seconds to install, and both will save you hours the first time you need them.

Wiki reference: Burp Suite/Extensions.

How To Install BApp Store Extensions

For anyone who hasn't installed a Burp extension before:

1. In Burp, go to Extensions → BApp Store
2. Search for the extension name
3. Click "Install"
4. Wait for it to appear in the Installed tab …

Part 5 of our PortSwigger Web Security Academy series. This is the meaty one. We already covered blind SQLi with conditional responses, where the page renders differently depending on the truth of an injected boolean. This post covers what to do when the page doesn't render differently - but you can still smuggle information out by deliberately causing SQL errors.

The example is PortSwigger's Lab 12, which is Oracle-flavored. Full notes: SQL Injection/Blind.

The Six Steps

The full attack has six steps:

1. Prove the parameter is injectable
2. Fingerprint the database
3. Confirm a users table exists
4. Confirm the administrator user exists …

Part 4 of our PortSwigger Web Security Academy series. This one covers blind SQL injection with conditional responses, which is the easier of the two blind SQLi flavors we work through in this series.

Wiki notes: SQL Injection/Blind.

The Setup

Some SQL injection vulnerabilities never give you a direct channel back for the query results. The application runs a SQL query with your input, but the response doesn't render the result or leak database errors. The canonical example is a cookie tracking ID: the ID gets used in a SQL query on every request, but the query output is …

Part 3 of our PortSwigger Web Security Academy series. Part 2 sketched the four SQL injection shapes at a bird's-eye view. This post drills into one of them: the UNION attack. It is one of the most useful shapes to understand because it converts a small SQLi foothold into an "I can read anything in the database" primitive.

Wiki reference: SQL Injection/UNION Attack.

The Idea

Say a page runs

SELECT name, description FROM products WHERE category = 'Gifts'

The columns you can see in the response are name and description, because that is what the query is selecting. UNION lets …

This post is part 1 of a series. We spent a chunk of May and June 2023 working through the PortSwigger Web Security Academy labs, mostly the SQL injection track, and taking notes on our wiki as we went. This post is the setup - what the Academy is, why we picked it, and how it fits together. The posts that follow will cover the specific techniques.

What the Academy Is

PortSwigger makes Burp Suite, which is the standard tool for web application security testing. They also run a free online academy at portswigger.net/web-security, which consists of written lessons …