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70% of Sites Hackable? $1,000 Says "No Way"

Posted by kdawson on from the money-where-mouth-is dept.

netbuzz writes "Security vendor Acunetix is flogging a survey that claims 7 out 10 Web sites it checked have vulnerabilities posing a medium- to high-level risk of a breach of personal data. Network World's go-to security guy, Joel Snyder, says that percentage is 'sensationalist nonsense' — and he's willing to back that judgment with $1,000 of his own money. In fact Snyder will pay up if Acunetix can get personal data out of 3 of 10 sites chosen at random from their survey list."

1 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Been there, done that, got the logs to prove it... by Zapotek · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'll put $10k on the table with Snyder.

    In fact I had my site checked with Acunetix when I requested a trial.
    And as a crazy geek I have coded a WebIDS for my CMS and a security system so tight that's close to, I dare say, un-hackable.
    So I had them scan my site just for kicks and to see the HTTP requests they were using.

    Needless to say ALL I got were false positives, well I did have an e-mail address on the site for submitions of papers, code etc and they reported it as a personal data.

    I replied to them explaining that the site is perfectly safe, they checked again and I got a "We're sorry for the inconvenience." styled e-mail admitting the results were wrong.

    Anw, Acunetix can find vulnerabilities, but it's not *THAT* accurate, its good enough though.