Website Security

How to secure your website users information

Website security when collect users’ personal information or working with an online database system is extremely important; there are actually a few different methods that can be used to help secure this data.

Securing Your Online Database

First let’s talk about securing data within a database such as MySQL, this is important because you never know who might gain access to the database itself, this could be a potential problem if an unreliable employee or administrator gets direct access to the database and the information it holds. To prevent an in-house security threat it’s a good idea to make sure all important information is encrypted using a secure and strong encryption method such as Mcrypt.

Database systems such as MySQL also have their own built in encryption methods as well, including one way encryption which is great for storing passwords and other types of information that never need to be unencrypted. Depending on the database system other encryption methods may be available as well, make sure your database developer is aware of what information needs to be protected.

Securing Information Over The Internet

If you are allowing users personal information to be accessed over the internet through a website browser of any kind you should have what is called an SSL Certificate from an identifiable authority such as Comodo.

What SSL does is allow you to encrypt data that is being sent through your website to the browser, what this creates is an encrypted tunnel making it very hard for a hacker to interrupt any transaction making your users data very safe; this is the same type of technology banks use for their online banking systems.

Keep in mind that there are different strengths of SSL Certificates, currently 256bit is the standard encryption strength, SSL may required a few add-ons to your current website hosting account such as a dedicated IP Address, but this is a must have if you are relaying users information across the internet.