We had a ton of them at a company I worked at. They consided themselves a start-up (or "we have a start-up culture" which means "we don't bother doing things co

We had a ton of them at a company I worked at. They consided themselves a start-up (or "we have a start-up culture" which means "we don't bother doing things correctly and everyone works their asses off"). The number of ways you could pwn them from inside and out absolutely astonished me when I first joined. I had come from a stuffy company that had boring stuff like change control, technical architects, project plans etc. I wasn't sure how exactly to get stuck into the workload because there was so much wrong, and so much new stuff to build on top of the wrongness. So I decided to deploy a general discovery script that ran ps/lsof stuff. The results: lots and lots of stuff running as root, listening on various ports. Next step: running `curl icanhazip.com` (yeah, EC2 classic FTW!) and then hitting the IPs with nmap from outside the network to see what could be reached directly. Maybe nobody did this before, or maybe they did, and they found a lot of scary stuff that they didn't have bandwidth to fix and simply ignored it. But right away I had a bunch of SEVs on my hands. Worst case was a provisioning system that was hooked up to AWS, served to the world over port 80, using a super-duper lame password. We also had a very junior professional services team who would implement garbage-fires all over the place based on customer requirements. That whole team was a joke. The real engineering team didn't consider them "engineers". There was little communication between them. Some of the solutions they built were simply horrendous. One implemented a web-based form that allowed the customer... any customer... actually anybody... to stop/start a particularly broken part of our product. Kinda like self-service problem resolution for customers, instead of just fixing the cause of the issue. If you discovered this webpage by accident who knows what else you could have done with it before we closed it down. There were other major issues. At one point a mysql server was exposed to the world with root/root. Did that company fail? Nope. IPO'd for billions. And most of the people who put out fires like those for years while the founders told us to our faces that we'd all be rich... got sod-all.