"David Litchfield" (born 1975) is a renowned security expert from the United Kingdom, who focuses on the discovery and publication of computer security vulnerabilities with a special focus on database server software. Information Security Magazine voted him as "The World's Best Bug Hunter" for 2003.

More David Litchfield on Wikipedia.

SQL injection is probably today's biggest security issue. This problem has been known about for years, but seven out of ten Web applications are still vulnerable. I find it extremely frustrating.

On November 7 NGS alerted NISCC to the problem. It was hoped that due to the severity of the problem that Oracle would release a fix or a workaround for this in the January 2006 Critical Patch Update. They failed to do so.

This specific flaw was reported to Oracle on the 19th of February 2006.

We disclosed this to Oracle on Oct. 25 last year. Around the same time, they were alerted to another high-risk flaw that is not as serious as this one. They fixed that one in the January CPU but neglected to fix this. It's not a case of not having enough time, because the fix is trivial and the risks are severe.

Oracle still has not released an official patch, so it is still leaving its customers at risk. It is a trivial thing to fix. If the company is still working on it, I do not understand why.

This is a very critical issue and it's disappointing that Oracle hasn't fixed it, especially since the workaround is rather simple.

I don't think leaving their customers vulnerable for another 3 months (or perhaps even longer) until the next CPU [Critical Patch Update] is reasonable especially when this bug is so easy to fix and easy to workaround. Again, I urge all Oracle customers to get on the phone to Oracle and demand the respect you paid for.

Someone can come in off the Internet over the Web without a user ID or password and interact with the back-end database server, so it goes through all the firewalls. This is critical.

It's quite astonishing how backwards they are in their approach to security.