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I see these apologist comments on every HBGary article and, please, it's not rocket science.

When you call yourself a "security company" then it is not too much asked to please not expose a half-baked PHP Application to the public. It is not too much asked to have your team adhere to the most basic password practices.

A defender needs to constantly monitor, test, review isolate and basically never make any mistakes.

This is bordering on FUD.

No, as far as your network presence is concerned there is a very finite number of attack vectors. For most companies there is no reason to expose more than a very small set of services to the world. Hardening these services is well understood.

If I only open Port 22 and 80 to you, and the webserver will serve only static files, then you'll have a pretty damn hard time owning that box, unless you have access to very rare and precious remote exploits for the kernel, OpenSSH or nginx. And unless I make very basic mistakes in configuring these things.

Moreover good security is layered. It's absolutely ridiculous to try to come up with excuses for a security company having their CMS broken into and that being enough to effectively travel their entire network.

Any admin worth their salt will put the company wordpress on a separate server, with zero trust-relationship to the rest of the infrastructure. It's a no-brainer.

Yes, incompetence is widespread. But please call it out for what it is and don't try to come up with justifications.



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