Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what makes "corporate" applications so different.

Why does my corporate bug tracker need different security from Gmail? Does that different security do anything?

Typically the corporate environment includes many "line of business" apps, which are often a simple web interface onto a custom application. It's not common for these to have Gmail-level hardening, and so security is provided by restricting access to the underlying network with a VPN.

> It's not common for these to have Gmail-level hardening

Translation for those not in the business: They are custom J2EE applications made by the combined forces of over-expensive consultants and CEOs nephew, running on unpatched Windows 2003 servers with plain HTTP login form (obviously vulnerable to SQL injection) and DB listening on 0.0.0.0 with default admin credentials. But it's in the internal network, so don't worry, no hacker can get there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com