<i>fending off security issues</i><p>This is my general experience with all platforms and operating systems. You have to keep up to date.<p>PHP was early on the web scene, and like ASP it encouraged a lot of bad practices (like concatenating user input into SQL strings) before people knew better.<p>These days, in the hands of a competent developer, it&#x27;s no worse than any other mainstream stack as far as security goes.