The industry is held to no standards at all. You can keep plain-text passwords in your databases, do no tests at all, and be incompetent in a million other ways. I usually get downvotes when I say this, but by now there needs to exist certain regulation on commercial software and software-based services. It should be ensured that certain practices are followed in security and ethics (do you take the basic, well known precautions against the well-known attacks?, do you respect your users' privacy at least as much as the law requires you to, do you follow the terms and conditions you declare?). What we need is CE for software, and it's sad that I can ensure my cheese comes from a certain town and is produced from the milk from cows eating according to a certain diet, but not if Twitter (or any other commercial website) hashes and salts my password, and actually uses basic precautions against CSRF or what not. These companies should be obliged to get their stuff audited by third parties, and there should be a way to tell if they are really approved to maintain a certain standard in producing their software. I do understand and share the hacker culture, and appreciate how it's possible to spin off a start-up website business on the internet, but business is business. You don't become exempt from regulations when all you do is to run a tiny B&B with 2 rooms. Similarly, as soon as you're a company selling online services, regulations and standards should kick in. Because by now those online services are no less important than food business. You say it's impossible to stop all cyber attacks. Then, as it is impossible to stop all burglary attempts, should banks just deposit their money in some apartments, or in some random rooms where all the security is a wooden door? Fire all the security guards because it's impossible they survive all the guns out there? These companies like LinkedIn are no different in banks insomuch as they deposit not our money, but our personas. They should actually be more cautious because while money can be replaced, nobody can have a new self.