Chapter 1. General Security Best Practices

Securing the database may be the single biggest action an organization can take in proactively defending itself against the myriad of unforeseen hostile intruders. Databases are the vaults that hold an organization’s most valuable digital assets. Compromise of these assets can lead to negative publicity, litigation, lost revenue, loss of customer trust, and many other negative results.

Securing your databases may sound like a simple task, but there are many things you have to understand to do this effectively; and many of the actions and much of the knowledge doesn’t even involve technology! Unlike the following chapters, which focus on Oracle database security with lots of sample code, the discussion in this chapter is high level (without any code) and meant to explain the principles and concepts that the examples in the following chapters will adhere to.