Website Security Without Breaking the Bank?

An anonymous reader writes "I do my own Web design and have a few websites — MySQL, PHP, CSS, HTML, that kind of thing. It's simple, amateur stuff, but I would love to have some reasonable ways to assess their security myself and patch the big holes, or possibly enlist someone to do 'white hat' work to assist me. I have absolutely no idea how to proceed. I don't want to get mired in a never-ending paranoia-fueled race to patch holes before the hackers find them, but on the other hand, I don't want my websites to look like Swiss cheese. Right now, I wouldn't know what kind of cheese they look like: Swiss, Havarti, or hard as Parmesan. How can I take reasonable steps to protect these websites myself? What books has the community found useful? What groups (if any) can offer me inexpensive white-hat hacking that won't end up costing me a first-born child? Or am I better off just waiting until a problem arises and then fixing it?"

Comments

YOU FAIL IT?

[Anonymous Coward]

ASSOCIATION OF minutes. If that.

http://www.snort.org/

[boredhacker]

should help some

Re:Learn good coding practice

[Anonymous Coward]

-1:Troll && -1:Flamebait != -1:StronglyDisagreeAndWishToCensor

P.S. Your C-ish syntax sucks. I can't think of any language that would do the "correct" comparisons given syntax like that.