OCTom (4/10/2014)
Hackers are not going to try to hack all severs. They look for the easiest path. This is one area where it's best to be the ugly duckling at the dance. Make it as difficult as you can for hackers and they will leave you alone for someone easier and more attractive.As Eric said, it would be great to have industry standards for DBAs and developers. Who would set the standards? I don't know that the government would be the best choice. Do you want different standards for each vendor; Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, open source, etc."
Tom
The standards would not have to be very technical. Dedicated sysadmin accounts, removal of service accounts from sysadmin role, seperation duties, application accounts with minimal privilege (ie: no ad-hoc sql and access only to required tables), encryption at rest for columns containing sensitive data, encrypted backups, encrypted connections between application and database layer: these basic best practices would apply to any enterprise database platform. If a database platform doesn't provide support, then the organization has simply chosen the wrong platform.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho