hi. i run a website which i want to harden against hacking by 3rd parties.
i wrote this website back in 2002-2010, and then built apps on top of the base code. now i want to upgrade the entire thing to the latest css3 standards and also include anti-hacking measures, because at one point i got kicked off the internet by my ISP because they detected the thing had indeed been hacked, and someone installed phishing software on my site. i want to employ cron jobs that run regularly, to do checksum testing of vital parts of my operating system. ideally, i could have a script run indefinitely or every 2 seconds, as root, from cron, to test for changes to my filesystem (well, the part that is governed by Directory section in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/001-localhost.conf) and vital OS config files. but i do wonder if this is going to wear out the SSD where the OS and webserver files are stored on. and i wonder if i should be writing this script as some sort of shell script (bash? /bin/sh? i dunno (i run ubuntu 20.04)), or if i could be using the convenient php for it. and i would like to know if as far as exploits go, it's better to stay (currently) on php7.4, or move my entire setup to php8. thanks for your attention and any help you might provide me. :)
