How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
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Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#2What a crazy story. If the timelines are accurate there was an extremely small chance of this happening. Bad luck all around.
My site is still down, guess i'm in the unlucky 1%.
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#3Goes to show you why the DRY principle (I might be stretching that analogy here, but bear with me) is important here - if you have old stuff lying around in production that was cloned a long time ago, you might forget about it and open yourself up to unfortunate incidents like this.
PHP Fog is doing great work to make the PHP ecosystem easier to work with, and I hope they didn't suffer too much from this mistake.
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#4I feel really bad for the phpfog guys. But given the situation, I think they handled it admirably well - kudos to them. No software is secure and this could have happened to anyone. Especially startups who have to take shortcuts at the very beginning.
I know the attackers were just kids but I have to admit pursuing legal action sounds very tempting - even to just act as a deterrent to others. If they had just put up phpfogsucks.com, it might have been ok. But tweeting trash from their twitter account, redirecting their root domain to phpfogsucks, etc - are all not cool at all and should have some consequences.
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#5[deleted]
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#6[deleted]
Actually phpfog is built on Ruby
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#7[deleted]
They're actually a Ruby shop according to the leaked codebase.
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#8great to hear all the details so quickly so that others building similar systems aren't in the same situation. as fellow PHP'ers its also great to hear that you are not blaming it on PHP somehow (no fuel for the php haters).
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#9What a crazy story. If the timelines are accurate there was an extremely small chance of this happening. Bad luck all around. My site is still down, guess i'm in the unlucky 1%.
Can you give us more details at help.phpfog.com please? (apologies if I'm breaking HN etiquette)
Re: How We Got Owned by a Few Teenagers (and Why It Will Never Happen Again)
#10I feel really bad for the phpfog guys. But given the situation, I think they handled it admirably well - kudos to them. No software is secure and this could have happened to anyone. Especially startups who have to take shortcuts at the very beginning. I know the attackers were just kids but I have to admit pursuing legal action sounds very tempting - even to just act as a deterrent to others. If they had just put up…
Hire the hackers. It's what the CIA would do.