I posted a question in the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5171025 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5171025 Turns out the matches are dete

I posted a question in the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5171025 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5171025 Turns out the matches are determined by the beginning character of the string column. For example, if the user's token is '5feZas0352f', the query SELECT * FROM users WHERE reset_token = 5; will match that user. And if it doesn't start with a number, 0 will match it. The behaviour is documented here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/type-conversion.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/type-conversion.html > For comparisons of a string column with a number ... there are many different strings that may convert to the value 1, such as '1', ' 1', or '1a'.