Stop Using Production Data For Development

production to refresh development

A common software development practice is to take data from a production system and restore it to a different environment, often called “test”, “development”, “staging”, or even “QA”. This allows for support teams to troubleshoot issues without making changes to the true production environment. It also allows for development teams to build new versions and … Read more

Use SQLMap to Connect Directly to Azure SQL Database

Use SQLMap to connect directly to azure SQL database

I’ve written before about using sqlmap to perform sql injection testing against a website. It is also possible to use sqlmap to connect directly against a database. In this post I will show you how to use sqlmap to connect directly to Azure SQL Database. Once connected you can enumerate objects, open a shell, or … Read more

Modify SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database

Modify SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database

At SQL Server Live last November, I demonstrated enabling SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. During the class discussion I explained you must use Powershell to modify SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. So, that’s my post today, showing you how it is done. By default, SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database will enable the … Read more

SQL Injection Protection

sql-injection-example-feature

SQL injection is a common form of data theft. I am hopeful we can make SQL injection protection more common. The 2018 TrustWave Global Security Report listed SQL Injection as the second most common technique for web attacks, trailing only cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This is a 38% increase from the previous year. That same … Read more