9 Free Pentesting Tools to Detect SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

Quick Summary: SQL injection is a critical security risk that you can detect and mitigate with pentesting. If you are short on budget, you can pick free SQL injection pen testing tools that offer automated testing to discover vulnerabilities. In this blog, you can find a list of top free SQL pen testing tools to detect and mitigate SQL injection risks.

The personal data of over 93 million people was compromised a few years back when the popular file transfer software MOVEit experienced a cyberattack. The attackers used SQL injection to compromise its database and steal the personal information of millions of individuals.

This is a typical example of the dangers of SQL injection, which is one of the most common vulnerabilities found across applications. So, detecting and mitigating this vulnerability is crucial to protect your application from cyberattacks.

Here comes the role of free SQL injection penetration testing tools that automate vulnerability testing and discover this security flaw at a fast speed. These tools help continuously test applications for free and uncover vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.

Free penetration testing tool can help you reduce overall costs in pen testing and enable you to protect your application from one of the most notorious security risks. But which tool is the best one? Answering this question can be difficult for you if you are not aware of the top free SQL injection pen testing tools.

In this blog, we have curated a list of SQL pen testing tools that are free and preferred by most security testing professionals. You can rely on these tools for quality security audits to strengthen your cybersecurity posture against SQL injection attacks.

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A Quick Overview of SQL Injection Vulnerability

SQL injection, abbreviated as SQLi, is a kind of cyberattack vector that involves using malicious SQL commands for attacks. The prime target of such attacks is the vulnerable databases to illicitly obtain sensitive information.

Web applications use SQL (Structured Query Language) queries to fetch or store data in a database. Usually, applications leverage input fields in forms to get data information and build SQL queries dynamically to store or retrieve data at runtime.

However, often, these applications don’t validate and sanitize the input. As a result, an attacker can insert SQL queries in input fields that are unwittingly executed by the application, leading to compromised data and user access.

Why Does Detection and Prevention of SQL Injection Matter?

For years, SQL injection has been on top of the list of most critical OWASP security risks. Besides, it is a reliable cyberattack technique for attackers to gain access to sensitive data by manipulating SQL queries. When successful, an attacker not only steals your data but can also modify or damage it, which can cause a huge loss to your organization. So, detecting and preventing SQL injection is crucial to prevent potential damage that an attacker can cause to your organization. The following are the reasons why it matters.

• Data Exposure: An attacker can use SQL injection to modify or obtain sensitive data. As a result, your sensitive corporate data could be at risk of exposure.
• Threat to Privacy: SQL injection can cause data breaches that could reveal users' information to unauthorized individuals.
• Give Privileged Access: There is a possibility that an attacker can gain access to a privileged account like an administrator. In that case, the attacker can do more severe harm than you can imagine to your systems.
• Risk to Data Integrity: An attacker can breach your data integrity by altering or removing the information stored in your database.

What are the Top Free SQL Injection Penetration Testing Tools?

There are many pentesting tools that you can use to discover SQL injection vulnerabilities and prevent bad actors from stealing or damaging your data. Let’s check out these tools.

ZeroThreat

ZeroThreat’s automated penetration testing enables you to precisely expose SQL injection and thousands of other vulnerabilities. It combines automated vulnerability scanning with next-gen DAST capabilities, providing vulnerability assessments with 98.9% accuracy.

It discovers vulnerabilities by imitating the actions of a real hacker with simulated cyberattacks and offers near-zero false positive results. You can perform pen testing for over 40,000 vulnerabilities without any configuration and easily integrate it into the development environment.

Nmap

Network Mapper or Nmap is another pen test tool that you can leverage to identify a wide range of vulnerabilities, including SQL injection. It works by scanning HTTP servers to discover URLs containing queries susceptible to SQL injections. It also checks forms to discover vulnerable fields.

It is an open-source tool that offers network discovery and security auditing. Nmap analyzes networks by using IP packets in an unconventional manner. It provides information about a network’s hosts, services offered on the host, operating system used, and lots of other information.

It is compatible with all major operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It can efficiently scan even large and complex networks.

SQLMap

It is an open-source SQL injection tool that automatically detects and exploits SQL injection vulnerabilities. It offers a variety of features and options for pen testing and discovers injection vulnerabilities in web applications and databases.

With a powerful detection engine, SQLMap executes a myriad of tests, including database fingerprinting, data over-fetching, executing arbitrary commands, and more. It allows testers to perform SQL injection tests like boolean, error-based, blind, and time-based.

ZAP

Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is widely used for penetration testing and began as an OWASP project. It is a great tool for SQL penetration testing to discover and prevent this vulnerability before an attacker takes advantage of it.

It is designed to pen test web applications and discover vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, misconfigurations, and more. ZAP is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. Its GUI-based interface enables you to set up and schedule automated tests easily.

JSQL

Another free SQL penetration testing tool is jSQL, which is a software written in Java. It offers automatic SQL database injection to discover vulnerabilities. It automates injection attacks for 33+ databases, including MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, FrontBase, Sybase, Oracle, CockroadDB, and more.

You can use multiple injection strategies like blind, time, error, stacked, and more to perform pen tests. Other features of this SQL injection test tool include authenticated testing, proxy, database fingerprinting, bruteforce password hash, and more.

Burp Suite

Burp Suite Community Edition is a free pen testing tool that offers both automated and manual testing of web applications. It enables testers to run automated vulnerability scans on web applications. It helps discover vulnerabilities by intercepting and modifying web traffic by working as a proxy between a server and a browser.

This tool is helpful in detecting known web application vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, indirect object references, and more. You can leverage it to pen test your web application for free and discover SQL injection vulnerabilities.

W3af

It is also an open-source pen testing tool that you can use to discover a myriad of vulnerabilities in web applications, including SQL injection. This tool is compatible with a myriad of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and more.

This tool offers excellent features for SQL penetration testing to help you test your web application for potential injection vulnerability. Besides, it also offers extensions to customize HTTP requests and perform more innovative attacks. It has a fuzzing engine to test your application with complex inputs.

Metasploit

Metasploit is one of the SQL injection tools that help perform a wide range of attacks. It is a comprehensive pen testing tool for web apps, networks, and systems that offers a myriad of exploits, payloads, and auxiliary modules.

You can simulate different types of attacks with the tools and features offered by Metasploit. It has a huge library of more than 1,600 exploits. It offers customizable testing methods to help evaluate web apps and systems at a greater depth.

OpenVAS

OpenVAS is also a popular open-source vulnerability scanner that identifies common vulnerabilities like SQL injection. With automated vulnerability scanning of web apps, networks, and systems, you can efficiently discover critical vulnerabilities.

It offers authenticated and unauthenticated scanning to analyze different web pages including those protected behind logins. OpenVAS offers customizable scanning, compliance reporting, and endpoint scanning. It offers continuous monitoring and scheduled scanning to uncover risks.

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Essential Tips to Choose the Right SQL Injection Pen Testing Tool

Detecting and removing SQL injection vulnerability is vital to protect your application and system from injection attacks. You need a good pen test tool to detect this vulnerability accurately. However, choosing such a tool can be confusing, given so many choices. The following are some tips for choosing the right SQL injection pen test tool.

Ease of Use

A simple user interface will help you perform pen tests more quickly and easily. Plus, it will enable even a non-technical user to perform tests. Besides, it should offer a clean dashboard to view reports and manage features easily, which would make pen testing hassle-free without complex setups.

Authenticated/Unauthenticated Scanning

Choose a pentesting tool that offers both authenticated and unauthenticated scanning. Both kinds of testing will help you choose the level of depth you want to test for vulnerabilities. Authenticated scanning will enable you to scan even pages protected with login credentials.

Actionable Reports

A good tool offers clear and structured reports with vulnerability prioritization. Besides, the reports generated by such tools also offer clear steps or suggestions for remediating vulnerabilities. This will help reduce your MTTR (Mean Time-to-Remediate).

Features

Compare the features offered by a SQL injection pen test tool relative to its price. Although most SQLi detection software offers similar features, they stand apart in some specific features compared to their prices.

Scalability

Another important factor to consider is scalability. Is your pen test tool sufficient to meet your growing business needs? The tool should be able to align with the current size and future expansion.

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Use Next-Gen Automated Pentesting to Uncover SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

SQL injection is one of the biggest security threats today that puts your corporate data at risk. Many high-profile data breaches were caused by SQL injection attacks like MOVEit, Yahoo!, 7-Eleven, and Sony are a few names in such incidents.

Proper identification and mitigation of SQL injection require the next-gen automated pen test tool – ZeroThreat. It goes beyond traditional vulnerability scanning and analyzes your applications like a real pentester. Equipped with an AI-powered spider, it can scan and discover vulnerabilities in deep corners of your application and authenticated scanning helps analyze even protected pages.

It simulates blind injection, out-of-band SQLi, error-based SQLi, time-based SQLi, and other types of SQL injections to help you precisely discover this injection vulnerability. So, what are you waiting for? Start scanning your application now and uncover critical vulnerabilities at the earliest.