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Why are big sites like CBS.com still getting hacked?

4 points by JakeFratelli ↗ HN
I'm trying to figure out how the websites of big companies are still getting compromised and defaced. Many of the attacks don't seem that sophisticated. . . thought this community might be able to help clarify. Thanks

8 comments

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JakeFratelli
*Point of clarification: I'm not asking why Anon went after them, just how they could be so vulnerable.
JuurianChi
CBS and other companies are what we call "old money". And when it comes to things like Websites and social networks, they just don't have the mindset that they should have when it comes to it. That said, their servers are greatly under managed, and the people working in those areas are unable to keep up because when they first started, they where still writing "the book". Also, Anon is made up of more than just bored 18 year olds (As the media greatly dramatizes.)but rather "disgruntled" and "fed up" masters who want to retaliate in any way possible.
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EwanToo
In general, you only need to make 1 mistake for your website to be vulnerable to what looks like a trivial hack.

The mistake could be anything from an insecure form input parser, through to not updating your web server to the latest update.

Once one hacker finds that vulnerability, it looks like it's an easy thing to do to take down or modify the side, but the finding of it can be extremely time consuming.

On the other side, look at who didn't go down in the recent Anonymous attacks - CBS and Universal Music went down, but Sony, EMI, Warner, etc, remained up.

Anonymous only had to find a couple of major relevant corporations that were vulnerable to make a big impact, it doesn't matter that the other dozens (100s?) of suitable targets were more secure.

JakeFratelli
If it only takes 1 mistake, would having a hot backup or failover be a best practice, so that if something does happen, you can immediately channel traffic to a live site?
EwanToo
Quite often the failover is just a DNS change to a static page saying "Sorry, we're currently unavailable".

The difficulty of having a hot backup is preventing a hacker repeating their attack immediately after you fail over.

JakeFratelli
Thanks EwanToo - that makes perfect sense. A combination of some security monitoring system that notifies you of the vulnerabilities along with someone to update your system is needed. But what if the updates have dependencies, for instance, incompatible Ruby gems or so. At that point, do you have to make the tradeoff of security risk vs time to update all gems/resolve incompatibility issues/deal with bugs in latest release?
EwanToo
Exactly, if you've got a complex environment, you might not even know that one of your suppliers deployed an insecure ruby gem (or any other package), but you'll want to do full testing before upgrading.

All this leaves big windows of opportunity for attacks.