If an attacker wants to perform a new line injection attack in a log file, what would they inject into the log?

• A. HTML tags
• B. Single pipe character
• C. Multiple pipe characters
• D. Plaintext

Answer: (D)

The idea behind a new line injection into a log is that logs are plain text files. To create an extra log entry, an attacker can insert a newline character, effectively starting a new line. The content on that new line can be normal text, i.e., plaintext. There’s no need for special formatting like HTML tags, which would only matter if the log were rendered in a browser, or for delimiter tricks like pipes, which aren’t required to achieve a simple line break. So the attacker would inject plaintext content (potentially including a newline) to produce the additional log line.