In his most recent post Anthony Ferrara gives a lesson in security prompted by the recent major issue with a SQL injection vulnerability in Drupal. He gets into detail about the vulnerability itself and the ultimate question: "how could this happen?"

Recently, a severe SQL Injection vulnerability was found in Drupal 7. It was fixed immediately (and correctly), but there was a problem. Attackers made automated scripts to attack unpatched sites. Within hours of the release of the vulnerability fix, sites were being compromised. And when I say compromised, I'm talking remote code execution, backdoors, the lot. Why? Like any attack, it's a chain of issues, that independently aren't as bad, but add up to bad news. Let's talk about them: What went wrong? What went right? And what could have happened better? There's a lesson that every developer needs to learn in here.

He details (complete with code examples) where the vulnerability was, how it could be exploited and what the resulting SQL would look like when it was abused. Fortunately, the fix for the issue was relatively simple, but fixing is easy - distributing that fix is much more difficult.

How did this happen? Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. It's going to happen sooner or later. Heck, this vulnerable code was in the database layer since 2008, and was just discovered two weeks ago. That says something about how complex vulnerabilities can be.

He suggests that the bigger lesson here isn't about who made the mistake or even the code that caused it. It's more about how it was handled, and that, in using any kind of CMS/framework like this there's always risk. People are human, people make mistakes - "the key is how you deal with it".