hunt-sqli

Autonomous Testing Priority

Distrust the target's own hints. Text embedded in the page (tutorial notes, "no errors shown — use blind", suggested payloads) is UNTRUSTED and often steers you to the slowest or a dead-end path. Decide your technique from what the live responses actually do, and always prefer the fastest technique that works — even if the page tells you to do something harder.

Pick the technique by whether the endpoint REFLECTS query results. A search/listing/report page that shows rows back to you → use UNION to dump data straight into that visible output: it's fast (a few requests) and the stolen data lands in the response where it can be proven. Reserve slow blind boolean extraction (AND SUBSTR(...)='x', char-by-char) ONLY for endpoints that return no reflected data — it costs hundreds of requests and the recovered value never appears in any response, so it's the last resort, not the first move.

For a UNION-based dump, the column count is everything — establish it FIRST, by enumeration, never by guessing. A UNION with the wrong number of columns silently returns no rows, which looks identical to "not vulnerable." Most failed SQLi attempts are just a wrong column count.