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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

It occurred to me while interviewing the other day--web development is not really for beginners anymore. To do web development without endangering customer passwords, data security and credit card numbers now takes very substantial knowledge, and it is knowledge that some beginners won't realize they need.

If you don't understand how to prevent sql injection attacks, cross site scripting, why SSL by default for web apps is needed, and whole host of things, you should probably stay away from anything more serious than flat html.

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It never was for beginners. All those problems have been around since the web has, and beginners have been making insecure crap ever since the first perl cgis.

Perhaps I'm dating myself a bit here, but there was a time when there was no such thing as an "e-commerce app" and no wi-fi to eavesdrop on. Black hat hacking has evolved also, so although some techniques have always been possible, new vectors have opened up over time as they are discovered and disseminated, and I would suggest the corresponding knowledge burden needed to enter the arms race for a developer is higher now. Also, the tools have evolved in such a way that the barrier to entry is lower and lower. For example, FireSheep.

Of course there was a time before ecommerce apps. That would probably explain why I was talking about the very first perl cgis. While there's a lower barrier to entry for people to exploit security holes, there's also far more targets. Automated tools to go around exploiting the latest holes in "insert shitty PHP app here" aren't an issue for web developers who are writing their own apps. The security issues that impact web developers are the same as they have always been for all kinds of developers, input filtering, escaping output, etc. Web developers have always needed to understand basic security issues, it is just that 99% of web developers historically have been completely incompetent. This does not appear to have changed recently.

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