PHP security

Is PHP secure?

If you search Secunia, you’ll find that PHP has some 1,800 security alerts reported to date.
Compare that with Perl’s 1,400 alerts, ASP’s 526, Java’s 236, against 9 for J2EE and 9 for ASP.Net!

We can’t say it has a good track record.

In fact the most recent alarms have to do with XML-RPC support in PHP, which has left many blog engines and other CMSs vulnerable, such as Drupal, mediawiki and Wordpress.

However...

PHP is flexible, easy to learn, and there is a lot of quality free software written in this language. You just have to be careful with the configuration and stay up to date (a windows user would say you have to keep your service packs current :)

If you’re starting out with PHP, I suggest first getting advice from people who know, and second, staying up to date on security alerts. You can sign up at secunia, a good place to keep up with security alarms of this kind.