PHP and MySQL Web Development - P62: PHP and MySQL Web Development teaches the reader to develop dynamic, secure, commercial Web sites. Using the same accessible, popular teaching style of the first edition, this best-selling book has been updated to reflect the rapidly changing landscape of MySQL and PHP. | Security Threats 277 It is possible that crackers will break into your system and format your hard drive. It is fairly likely that a careless programmer or administrator will delete something by accident and it is almost certain that you will occasionally lose a hard disk drive. Hard disk drives rotate thousands of times per minute and occasionally they fail. Murphy s Law would tell you that the one that fails will be the most important one long after you last made a backup. You can take various measures to reduce the chance of data loss. Secure your servers against crackers. Keep the number of staff with access to your machine to a minimum. Hire only competent careful people. Buy good quality drives. Use RAID so that multiple drives can act like one faster more reliable drive. Regardless of the cause there is only one real protection against data loss backups. Backing up data is not rocket science. On the contrary it is tedious dull and hopefully useless but it is vital. Make sure that your data is regularly backed up and make sure that you have tested your backup procedure to be certain that you can recover. Make sure that your backups are stored away from your computers. Although it is unlikely that your premises will burn down or suffer some other catastrophic fate storing a backup offsite is a fairly cheap insurance policy. Modification of Data Although the loss of data could be damaging modification could be worse. What if somebody obtained access to your system and modified files Although wholesale deletion will probably be noticed and can be remedied from your backup how long will it take you to notice modification Modifications to files could include changes to data files or executable files. A cracker s motivation for altering a data file might be to graffiti your site or to obtain fraudulent benefits. Replacing executable files with sabotaged versions might give a cracker who has gained access once a secret backdoor for future visits. You can protect .
