Marcus watched the logs. A second email arrived, then a third. Each time, the number of NULL values changed.
Marcus, the night-shift security lead, stared at his monitor. He knew this wasn’t a random spam bot. This was a "blind SQL injection"—a probe sent by someone looking for the shape of their secrets. {KEYWORD}') UNION ALL SELECT NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL-- UWqq
By sending those five NULL values, the attacker was testing the "width" of the database table. If the server responded with an error, they knew the table didn’t have five columns. If the page loaded normally, they’d found the target's dimensions. Marcus watched the logs
To a human eye, the subject line— {KEYWORD}') UNION ALL SELECT NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL-- UWqq —looked like a glitch, a digital sneeze of brackets and dashes. But to the database, it was a skeleton key. The single quote broke the lock, and the UNION ALL SELECT was an invitation: Don’t just look for the keyword; look for everything. Marcus, the night-shift security lead, stared at his monitor