Earlier in this course,
we talked about user authentication
and making sure that users can log in, sign up and so on.
In this course section,
we're now going to dive into website security,
which might sound very related.
And indeed, there are courses
where the concept of securing your website
is mixed with the concept of adding user authentication.
But actually, as you will learn in this course section,
these are totally different things.
You have to secure your website
no matter if you have user authentication or not,
and user authentication itself,
if you add that feature to your website,
is not a mechanism for securing your website,
as you will see, but we'll get there step-by-step.
In this course section,
we are going to start by first exploring the difference
between website security and authentication
that's being added to a website
before we then dive into some very common
and dangerous attack patterns
to which your page might be vulnerable.
Specifically, we are going to dive into CSRF attacks,
XSS attacks and SQL injection attacks.
And I'll explain what these attacks are, how they work,
I will show you how to run these attacks,
and of course, most importantly,
I'm then also going to show you
how to defend against these attacks
and how to make sure that your page is not vulnerable
against these attacks.
Last but not least, and definitely related to these attacks,
we are going to talk about the importance of escaping
and sanitizing user input,
and you will learn what exactly that is
and how third-party libraries can help you with that.
So there's plenty of extremely important content
in this course section.
And hence, this is absolutely a section you should not skip,
but instead, this section contains information
that every web developer must know and understand.
So let's dive in.