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The unfortunate truth is that the long-term costs to startups of compromised security is low because most people don't really care about it anyway. Target, Home

The unfortunate truth is that the long-term costs to startups of compromised security is low because most people don't really care about it anyway. Target, Home Depot, Adobe, et al aren't seeing a massive loss of revenue due to being compromised. There's a lot of press about incidents for a day or maybe three, it gets posted to HN and everyone has a <stuffy>very serious and very academic</stuffy> discussion about it, and within a week it's forgotten entirely. People just don't care. It's nothing more than a temporary nuisance to most people. There aren't any consequences that seriously impacts anyone's life. In the real world, startups are probably correct to focus first on new features and then patch security later. In an ideal world, that would be a mistake that would kill them.

wglb 12y ago
Regarding Target, http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/05/21/target-posts-mixed-first-quarter-results/ http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/05/21/target-post... and http://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-breach-costs-take-toll-on-target-profit/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-breach-costs-take-toll-on-t... The costs to Home Depot i would argue are not known. The danger to a startup in the payments business that gets breached before they open their doors could in fact have a long-lasting effect. It's nothing more than a temporary nuisance to most people. There aren't any consequences that seriously impacts anyone's life. My friend who is an FDA consultant who gets called when medical device manufacturing lines get shut down would very much disagree with that statement. The thing about the Adobe breach is that it hurts the ecosystem. Folks who put an email and a password out there that happened to use that same password for a bank or other critical resource are now more vulnerable. And the trick with the Adobe thing is that most of the folks that I surveyed that have emails out there don't remember signing up. People just don't care. And that is the crux of the problem.

wglb 12y ago

Regarding Target, http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/05/21/target-posts-mixed-first-quarter-results/ http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/05/21/target-post... and http://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-breach-costs-take-toll-on-target-profit/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/data-breach-costs-take-toll-on-t... The costs to Home Depot i would argue are not known. The danger to a startup in the payments business that gets breached before they open their doors could in fact have a long-lasting effect. It's nothing more than a temporary nuisance to most people. There aren't any consequences that seriously impacts anyone's life. My friend who is an FDA consultant who gets called when medical device manufacturing lines get shut down would very much disagree with that statement. The thing about the Adobe breach is that it hurts the ecosystem. Folks who put an email and a password out there that happened to use that same password for a bank or other critical resource are now more vulnerable. And the trick with the Adobe thing is that most of the folks that I surveyed that have emails out there don't remember signing up. People just don't care. And that is the crux of the problem.