Question

So say I find that I’m getting requests to my web application that are obviously SQL injection attacks or similar. I write a short test to check request variables for “naughty” strings. If I find one, what code ought I to respond with?

I’m thinking of returning “403 Forbidden” and no content, but I’m not sure.

Answer 1

I would think 403 Forbidden means that the resource shouldn’t be accessed.

I’d thus use 400 Bad Request instead. After all, the user is allowed to the page so long as they’re making a legitimate request.