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by antihero 4787 days ago
You can monitor exploit sites, but zero days are always possible and what will lead to serious hacks like this. So no, you can never be sure.

The best thing is to keep your eye on the culture of the developers and how seriously they take security - for instance the Ruby on Rails developers ignored exploits/reports until people blew them wide open. Now, if some other hacker had known about that before the disclosure, they could have owned any RoR sites.

From my experience, Django seems to be the best, and has not had any unfixed vulnerabilities for a while (though, due to it's complexity, it's completely possible that 0days exist). However, if I'm running Django sites and some do get owned, I can tell my boss/client/self/whatever that I did everything possible to prevent it happening.

There is no such thing as 100% secure, however, it's fairly reasonable to be hardened to all but the most dedicated crackers.

With an attack like HTP's, there's no fucking way anyone could have been expected to prevent, without running their entire own infrastructure, because they owned registras, Linode's LISH shell (so they get near-physical access to your Linode), and various other crap. If your boss were to fire you for getting owned in this attack, despite it preeetty much being zero of your own fault, they would be in the wrong (unless you have the resources to not depend on anyone).