Startups Increasingly Targeted With Hacks

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:31AM from the waiting-for-the-easy-marks-to-ripen dept.

ubrgeek writes: Slack, makers of the popular communications software, announced yesterday that they'd suffered a server breach. This follows shortly after a similar compromise of Twitch.tv, and is indicative of a growing problem facing start-up tech companies. As the NY Times reports, "Breaches are becoming a kind of rite of passage for fledgling tech companies. If they gain enough momentum with users, chances are they will also become a target for hackers looking to steal, and monetize, the vast personal information they store on users, like email addresses and passwords."

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Is it a problem with the technologies they use? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-03-28 03:46 · Score: -1, Troll

It's well known that almost all startups are capital-starved, even those that have received some venture funding. As a result, they often choose free technologies of dubious quality, such as PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript. I would even include most Linux distros on that list, now that so many of them use immature software like systemd, and vulnerable software like bash and OpenSSL. Bring all of this software together, and I could very well see the end result being a system that's easily compromised by outsiders.