Fedora bars SQLNinja hack tool

Fedora Project leaders have banned a popular penetration-testing tool from their repository out of concern it could saddle the organization with legal burdens.

The move came on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Fedora Project's board of directors rejecting a request that SQLNinja be added to the archive of open-source applications. It came even as a long list of other hacker tools are included in the bundle and was harshly criticized by some security watchers.

“It seems incredibly short sighted to reject software based on perceived legal usage,” said Jacob Appelbaum, a full-time programmer for the Tor Project. “They have decided to become judges of likely usage based on their own experience. That is a path of madness.” SQLNinja is an open-source toolkit that exploits SQL injection vulnerabilities in poorly configured web applications that use Microsoft SQL Server as the back-end database. Its creator, Alberto Revelli, concedes it “has an extremely aggressive nature,” in part because its focus is on taking over remote machines by “getting an interactive shell on the remote DB server and using it as a foothold in the target network.”