The ACCEPT statement causes data entered at the console or provided by the operating system to be made available to the program in a
specific data element, without any validation or sanitization.
Thus, if this data is accepted in a particular format and used by other procedures, the system is vulnerable to attack or malfunction.
What is the potential impact?
The lack of data validation and error checking when using the ACCEPT keyword in COBOL can lead to a number of security problems.
Data integrity problems
Without any form of validation, the ACCEPT keyword can store arbitrary input data, even if it does not conform to the expected format or type. This
can lead to data corruption, causing the program to behave unpredictably, crash, or corrupt customer data.
Injection attacks
Malicious users can enter data that contains commands or queries that are then executed by other procedures. This can lead to unauthorized access,
data leaks, or intrusions.
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to overload the system with large amounts of data or special characters, causing the program to slow
down or even stop working, resulting in a denial of service.
