Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks: Server Security from TLS to Tor

8. Database

If there is only one place in your infrastructure that holds important information, it’s likely to be a database. It’s popular these days for web applications to be largely stateless, which means those servers don’t store any data themselves. With stateless applications, you can spin up and spin down servers more or less at will—ideal for cloud environments. The thing is, though, those stateless applications generally do process and change data, it’s just that they store those changes in the database. In some cases, the database might be the only place in an environment where data does change and persist.

Because of the valuable data that’s there, access to the data in a database is one of a hacker’s primary goals. In addition to ...