Retrieving an sql database

I havnt posted in a long long long time here, but ive hit a bit of a wall in my learning.

Sql data bases seem rather interesting, storing a lot of personal information on users and such. So I started thinking, how do people steal the databases? I asked a few freinds and the most I got out of them was something along the lines of:

"Oh it's easy you just send the right packet to the server and it will respond by sending you the database"

Naturally this is not enough information.

Is this guy talking absolute crud? If not what kind of packets are we talking about and how would one go about stopping this kind of attack?

I don't think this is in the league of sql injection, but perhaps it is needed here also?

Remember I am trying to retrieve the database, not inject into it.

Any help is greatly appreciated :)

Well if you can inject to the databse theres a chance you could also run custom queries and other commands. In that case it would be as simple as running a dump command to output the entire database. Also it would probably be possible to at least read the permissions tables for MySQL itself then connect to the server (provided its improperly configured) and dump the databases that way also.

Most recently people have been getting this data, by companies losing backup tapes that have the information on them.

"it would be as simple as running a dump command to output the entire database"

Got any other info on this? maybe a possible example?

Mysqldump:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mysqldump.html

Im assuming if sql injection was required it would be more complicated then say:

'mysqldump [options] --all-databases

and then all the info will be displayed for me in a neat little package. Remember I do not have physical access to the datbase to make a nice neat backup.

I'm fairly new to the entire sql field, I read a nice article introducing it though (on these forums ;) ) so that has helped a lot.

If you want to see how sql injections work, check out hackthissite.org,

they have "realistic missions" that allow you to exploit sql injections, its onething to see how it works, and another thing to see data coming spitting out. Give it a shot.

google came up with the goods as usual and gave me a rather comprehensive guide to sql injection.

For future reference : http://www.securiteam.com/securityre...DP0N1P76E.html

hackthissite.org man havnt been there for some time, will have to take another look.

Thanks for your help.

If you have found an avenue to perform injection, then there is a high probability that the data will be easy to secure. (All depends on the access the SQL user has that the queries are performed with, you need FILE to do this next trick)
Just as a basic example, if you know the table name and fields you want (which you can find with the injection vector) then its as easy as injecting something like:

SELECT * INTO OUTFILE '/www/html/publicdirectory/stolendata.txt' FROM CreditCards;

now use a browser and download it.

-Maestr0