How do start-ups deal with (black hat) hackers?
modoc: Raise the barrier to entry as high as you reasonably can.If you aren't securing your servers, running a good firewall, logging a solid audit trail remotely, sanitizing your inputs, parameterizing your sql, encrypting your credit cards, and hashing your passwords, you're failing your customers.  If you're doing all of that, and are consciously thinking about security as you go, you're doing alright.Frankly, if you're doing that, the benefits of attacking you usually fall below the effort required.  There's plenty of sites out there with SQL injection vulnerabilities and un-encrypted credit cards in their DB.  There's a million sites with giant XSS holes.  If you don't have those holes, they'll leave you alone.The bigger worry at that point is dealing with a DDOS, either network level or service level.  Much harder to protect against, and much easier to launch against you, and a much more measurable bottom dollar impact.Don't forget about security.  I know you're cash-strapped, I know you have a million features you want to build, bugs you need to fix, etc...  But put yourself in your user's shoes.  They've entrusted you with their personal information and possibly their credit cards.  Your highest priority is to protect that data and live up to their expectations of privacy and security.  Display bugs in IE take a distant second place to that responsibility.I've dealt with a large number of attempted attacks both on my small sites, and when I worked for a Fortune 500 doing security architecture for their e-commerce sites.  My stuff is usually pretty secure, and I have lots of notifications about suspicious activity giving me visibility into who's prying at the door.  Thankfully no one has actually gotten in (that we're aware of) so we haven't had to respond to that, although we did have plans for that eventuality involving mostly our legal team and the FBI.  Frankly other than capturing as much audit trail data as you can on a separate internal secure server to provide to the LEO, there's not much you CAN do.  California has a number of notification and disclosure laws which cover a number of scenarios.  Good karma probably means you should abide by those laws for your non-California customers as well.I'm happy to answer any specific security questions you might have via e-mail (devon@digitalsanctuary.com), although I'm sure there are a large number of even more qualified people than me out there.