"could only have been done purposely". In this case there's also a chance it was negligence. Who gives a shit. Move fast. A negligent culture can probably do more damage than the odd individual doing something deliberately.

And even with a startup of two or three engineers, it's pretty much unforgivable.

It depends on how many users you have and what sort of data you're protecting. If you have a billion users then sending password reset tokens to your analytics provider is a very serious vulnerability. If you have 100 users and you're running a generic message board then it's not really a vulnerability because the difficulty of that method of attacking the assets under protection almost certainly exceeds their value.

> that method of attacking the assets under protection almost certainly exceeds their value

This was most likely the reasoning Sony had used (prior to 2012) when deciding how to safeguard the account info of users who had registered for marketing promotions.

It turned out that user credentials are unlike, say, office furniture, in that the cost of a data breach can vastly exceed the "value" of the protected "asset".

That's the best practice in the security world though. There's no such thing as an unhackable system, only systems where A) the cost of attacking them is more than the value of the assets under protection B) where the time it takes to attack the system is long enough for the attack to be detected.

C.f. Bruce Schneier's book: https://www.schneier.com/books/beyond_fear/

That book was from 2003.

This is Schneier in 2016: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?

"All this makes data a toxic asset, and it continues to be toxic as long as it sits in a company's computers and networks. The data is vulnerable, and the company is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to hackers and governments. It's vulnerable to employee error. And when there's a toxic data spill, millions of people can be affected. The 2015 Anthem Health data breach affected 80 million people. The 2013 Target Corp. breach affected 110 million.

If data is toxic, why do organizations save it?

..."

I really could not disagree with this more.