I am currently working on a project that will collect a lot of customer sensitive data. DOB, SSN, credit history, and other personal data.
This data is all used by a website which generates documents in PDF form which contains the personal data. Obviously if the customers' usernames and passwords are compromised their individual information is at risk, but what can I do to protect the database from being compromised?
Should I be encrypting the pdf documents and other information in the database? Will that cause significant performance problems as the number of users scale up?
Is it enough to keep the database server on a private network which the public web server accesses?
I am using MySQL