In the pantheon of open source heavyweights, few technologies are as ubiquitous as the MySQL RDBMS. Integral to popular software packages like WordPress and server stacks like LAMP, MySQL serves as the foundational data platform for a vast majority of websites and cloud services on the internet today. Unfortunately, its popularity translates to more commonly known attack vectors and security exploits —the following are 11 ways to shore up MySQL security and protect your data more effectively.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is widely used in the enterprise, despite a less-than-stellar reputation for security. In fact, for many “IIS security” is a contradiction of terms—though in all fairness, Microsoft's web server solution has improved significantly over the years. IIS 8.5 for server 2012 R2 and IIS 10 for 2016 have been hardened and no longer present the dangerous default configurations of older IIS iterations, but can still be further tightened.

Business partnerships require trust, but knowing whether your vendors merit that trust is difficult. With the rise of information technology, the ways in which trust can be broken, intentionally or unintentionally, have multiplied and become more complex. Vendor security assessment questionnaires are one method to verify that service providers follow appropriate information security practices so your business can weigh the risk of entrusting them with your data.

Vendor risk scoring is a practice that has emerged to address the complexity of vendor management by assigning vendors a single score– typically a number or letter grade– to facilitate comparison between vendors and portfolios. The past decades of digital transformation have provided both the need for innovative IT security hygiene assessment techniques and the technological capabilities to gather and analyze the data necessary to give those risk scores predictive power.

At Lookout, our mission has always been to make the mobile experience as secure as possible for customers. We’re proud to collaborate with AT&T to power and deliver the AT&T Mobile Security solution.