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

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."

Comments

This will end well...

[Smidge204]

At least he's not offering $1000 per site hacked, unlike the shmuck who offered a $1,200 bounty on every unsold PS3.

=Smidge=

I believe it

[Paulrothrock]

My I used to work as a web developer for a small company that did a lot of other small company's web sites. The amount of corners we cut in order to get the sites out in the time that the salesman stated was scary.

Passwords were often stored in the database in plain text. Credit cards, too. Data was taken directly from $_POST and put into SQL queries and curl calls to payment systems.

And if, in the future, we found these vulnerabilities and wanted to fix them, we had to escalate them to the CEO (did I mention the CEO is also the sales guy) before we could do any work on them.

If anything, 70% is low.