Final answer:
The manipulation of a database by an attacker to exploit a weakness is known as a SQL injection, which can lead to unauthorized data access or manipulation.
Step-by-step explanation:
In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.
When an attacker manipulates the database code to take advantage of a weakness in it, it is known as a SQL injection. This type of attack involves inserting or "injecting" a SQL query via the input data from the client to the application. A successful SQL injection exploit can read sensitive data from the database, modify database data (Insert/Update/Delete), execute administration operations on the database (such as shutdown the DBMS), recover the content of a given file present on the DBMS file system, and in some cases, issue commands to the operating system.