they've had issues with security around their own systems (payment info leaked, IIRC). And if their systems are compromised, because they have the ability to touch my systems (root password reset, for example), there's a potential breach there.
and they had their own massive DDOS attack which went on for days last winter (dec 2015?)
Their DDOS was so bad that we had to migrate all of our servers from Linode to Google, which wasn't particularly fun during the weeks of intermittent connectivity. I think it was on the order of weeks, rather than days.
Atlanta seemed to be the primary target. We had something at LA and never had a problem. Servers in Atlanta were down for days, then up for a bit, then down for days again. I do believe in total it was probably 2ish weeks...
London was affected too. I have since moved on to other VPS providers and would suggest Linode ONLY for hobby projects. It's not just their security issues, it is mostly their disclosure policy...
You're right, and the downtime was inexcusable. We've learned from what happened and are continuously working to upgrade and better protect our network, and periodically report on our progress on our blog: https://blog.linode.com/2016/05/02/network-status-updates-ap...
Among others, OP (likely) isn't referring to your own box specific security.