Bank of Timbuktu is a medium-sized, regional financial institution in Timbuktu. The bank has deployed a new Internet-accessible Web application recently. Customers can access their account balances, transfer money between accounts, pay bills and conduct online financial business using a Web browser.

John Stevens is in charge of information security at Bank of Timbuktu. After one month in production, several customers have complained about the Internet enabled banking application. Strangely, the account balances of many of the bank’s customers had been changed! However, money hasn’t been removed from the bank; instead, money was transferred between accounts. Given this attack profile, John Stevens reviewed the Web application’s logs and found the following entries:

Attempted login of unknown user: johnm
Attempted login of unknown user: susaR
Attempted login of unknown user: sencat
Attempted login of unknown user: pete”;
Attempted login of unknown user: ‘ or 1=1–
Attempted login of unknown user: ‘; drop table logins–
Login of user jason, sessionID= 0x75627578626F6F6B
Login of user daniel, sessionID= 0x98627579539E13BE
Login of user rebecca, sessionID= 0x9062757944CCB811
Login of user mike, sessionID= 0x9062757935FB5C64
Transfer Funds user jason
Pay Bill user mike
Logout of user mike

What kind of attack did the Hacker attempt to carry out at the bank?

A.
The Hacker first attempted logins with suspected user names, then used SQL Injection to gain access to valid bank login IDs.

B.
Brute force attack in which the Hacker attempted guessing login ID and password from password cracking tools.

C.
The Hacker attempted Session hijacking, in which the Hacker opened an account with the bank, then logged in to receive a session ID, guessed the next ID and took over Jason’s session.

D.
The Hacker used a generator module to pass results to the Web server and exploited Web application CGI vulnerability.

Explanation:
Typing things like ‘ or 1=1 – in the login field is evidence of a hacker trying out if the system is vulnerable to SQL injection.