Encrypting your data is an important step to protect your personal information while the data is not in use. There are multiple ways of encrypting your data. Full-disk encryption, using a container file that contains specific files that should be encrypted, encrypting single files or encrypting an entire directory.

PHP has some great advantages over several other languages in that it's really easy for beginners to set-up a basic website. That upside comes with some downsides too. A lot of basic PHP tutorials fail to cover important aspects of application security.

This post is divided into several sections each covering a different security threat and how to properly defend your site against it.