When thinking about security within a MySQL installation, you should consider a wide range of possible topics and how they affect the security of your MySQL server and related applications:
General factors that affect security. These include choosing good passwords, not granting unnecessary privileges to users, ensuring application security by preventing SQL injections and data corruption, and others. See Chapter 2, General Security Issues.
Security of the installation itself. The data files, log files, and the all the application files of your installation should be protected to ensure that they are not readable or writable by unauthorized parties. For more information, see Chapter 3, Postinstallation Setup and Testing.
Access control and security within the database system itself, including the users and databases granted with access to the databases, views and stored programs in use within the database. For more information, see Chapter 4, The MySQL Access Privilege System, and Chapter 5, MySQL User Account Management.
The features offered by security-related plugins. See Chapter 6, Security Plugins.
Network security of MySQL and your system. The security is related to the grants for individual users, but you may also wish to restrict MySQL so that it is available only locally on the MySQL server host, or to a limited set of other hosts.
Ensure that you have adequate and appropriate backups of your database files, configuration and log files. Also be sure that you have a recovery solution in place and test that you are able to successfully recover the information from your backups. See Backup and Recovery.