My stuff used to get popped daily. A janky PHP guestbook I wrote just to learn back in the early 2000s? No HTML injection protection & someone turned my site into spammy XSS hack within days. A WordPress installation I fell behind on patching? Turned into SEO spam in hours. A redis instance I was using just to learn some of their data structures that got accidentally exposed to the web? Used to root my computer and install a botnet RAT. This was all before 2020.
I never felt this made the internet "unsafe". Instead, it just reminded me how I messed up. Every time, I learned how to do better, and I added more guardrails. I haven't gotten popped that obviously in a long time, but that's probably because I've acted to minimize my public surface area, used star-certs to avoid being in the cert logs, added basic auth whenever I can, and generally refused to _trust_ software that's exposed to the web. It's not unsafe if you take precautions, have backups, and are careful about what you install.
If you want to see unsafe, look at how someone who doesn't understand tech tries to interact with it. Downloading any random driver or exe to fix a problem, installing apps when a website would do, giving Facebook or Tiktok all of their information and access without recognizing that just maybe these multi-billion-dollar companies who give away all of their services don't have your best interests in mind.
I really like how you take these situations and turn them into learning moments, but ultimately what you’re describing still sounds like an incredibly hostile space. Like yeah everyone should be a defensive driver on the road, but we still acknowledge that other people need to follow the rules instead of forcing us to be defensive drivers all the time.
The worst feeling I ever had was from exposing a samba share to the Internet in the 2000s and having that get popped and my dad’s company getting hacked because of the service I set up for him.
Hosting a WP with any amount of by script kiddies written third-party plugins without constant vigilance and keeping things up to date is a recipe for disaster. This makes it a job guarantee. Hapless people paying for someone to set up a hopelessly over-complicated WP setup, paying for lots of plugins, and constant upkeep. Basically, that ecosystem feeds an entire community of "web developers" by pushing badly written software, that then endlessly needs to be patched and maintained. Then the feature creep sets in and plugins stray from the path of doing one thing well, until even WP instance maintainers deem them too bloated and look for a simpler one. Then the cycle begins anew.
It's "not unsafe" if you take dozens of ever changing and hard to learn precautions and also get lucky that new exploits and your exposed services don't overlap? That's the internet being very unsafe.
> If you want to see unsafe, look at how someone who doesn't understand tech tries to interact with it.
Personal actions (and their safety) are a different category from environments (and their safety).
I never felt this made the internet "unsafe". Instead, it just reminded me how I messed up. Every time, I learned how to do better, and I added more guardrails. I haven't gotten popped that obviously in a long time, but that's probably because I've acted to minimize my public surface area, used star-certs to avoid being in the cert logs, added basic auth whenever I can, and generally refused to _trust_ software that's exposed to the web. It's not unsafe if you take precautions, have backups, and are careful about what you install.
If you want to see unsafe, look at how someone who doesn't understand tech tries to interact with it. Downloading any random driver or exe to fix a problem, installing apps when a website would do, giving Facebook or Tiktok all of their information and access without recognizing that just maybe these multi-billion-dollar companies who give away all of their services don't have your best interests in mind.