: This is a comment indicator that tells the database to ignore the rest of the original query that follows.

: The original table has exactly 5 columns. This confirms a vulnerability and allows the attacker to move to the next step: identifying which columns can display sensitive data.

: The number of NULL values (5 in this case) does not match the number of columns in the original table.

: This command combines the result set of the original query with a new set of data. UNION ALL is used instead of UNION because it is often faster and does not remove duplicates, which can be useful for certain types of data extraction.