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Startups Increasingly Targeted With Hacks
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."
They're getting cracked because they're not paying attention to their security.
Fuck you! If you cannot detect and mitigate a brute force attack then hire someone who can.
And make sure you know the difference between encrypted and hashed.
What's the demographic of the people running these startups? People who have grown up in the Web 2.0 age that think they know better than older folk that have already run into these situations and come up with means to mitigate them. Because it's "old" it's bad and has to be thrown away and discarded.
Having worked with some of these people first hand, my level of contempt for these webscale "developers" knows no bounds. It's like working with 15 year olds who think they know how the world works and complain bitterly that their parents are holding them back. Their a testament to Dunning and Kruger.
I've been pushing back at our company against using all these saas because this sort of situation is just going to keep happening, and undoubtedly escalate, all because webscale developers arrogantly dismiss the lessons of the past.
(eg: I actually had someone tell me that they refused to use port 80 because it was "against modern development practises". I'm pretty sure I physically felt several brain cells shrivel up and die when I heard that. They also refuse to use version control and branching because merges are "too problematic".)
Extreme/agile/whatever trendy fucking shit programming gets you what it says, extremely broken code.
These startups in a rush to get something out as these "development methodologies" say you should, shortcuts are taken, code isn't reviewed for security issues. The under 30 crowd think they're so AWESOME with their code, yet they don't know they're reinventing the same mistakes that were made 30 years ago.
The more things changes, the more they stay the same.
You can't afford Microsoft if you're cash starved anyways, so it's a moot point.
Life is not for the lazy.
I am not sure whether its sad or funny when people are so out of touch with reality as to call companies making massive amounts of money "start-ups".
Newer companies are more likely to have newer IT infrastructures and newer security. If they have a less secure setup than an established mega-corporation, it's because someone massively messed up and had their priorities wrong or they chose a crap vendor or two after buying into their marketing fluff about how secure they are. I suppose they also could have gone with whoever was cheapest for antivirus, firewall, monitoring, etc and that's an equally dumb mistakes. The good news is, startups that keep making stupid mistakes are going bankrupt anyway. The smart ones shouldn't get hacked because they're smart enough to prevent it and they will succeed anyway. So this is a less of a problem than you might think.
Twitch.tv was rebranded from Justin.tv, which started in 2007.
Now they're owned by Amazon.
By contrast, Amazon Web Services was started in 2006.
Hardly a start up.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
instead, these startups hire H1B visa holders, and do whatever it takes to cut corners.
Startups, especially those going through some sort of silly accelerator target one thing, a Minimally Viable Product. What does this MVP mean? Everything but security. VCs and these companies only worry about security once they 1) become big enough 2) get hacked.
+1, Troll.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.