A lot of applications will actually give full database privileges to a single user of the application. Sometimes, these privileges are enough to allow your application database user to have the same set of permissions as the root user of the database.

Now, this kind of implementation helps a lot in solving the issue of validating whether a certain user has a particular permission to conduct a database operation and having to switch the users to complete the database operation, but also opens a huge vulnerability with your application.

Imagine if somehow the credentials of one of the database users gets leaked. The attacker will now have complete access to your database, which makes them free to execute any kind of operation on the data stored inside the database. This can not only harm the data stored by your application in the database, but also the data that the other applications may also be storing in the same database environment, in case the user permissions provided the flexibility to have complete control of the database environment.

These were some of the anti-patterns that can help an attacker to exploit your application and risk the data associated with the application. So, what can we do so that our applications remain secure? Well, it turns out that some simple steps can easily improve the application's security. Let's take a look.