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Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#81

Post by pdpi »

kazinator wrote: post #27

Synopsis: SEC sends clear message to tech people in finance: shut the fuck up if you find something, silently fix it, and sweep the remaining crumbs under the rug, or else your company will be fined millions.

$7m is a slap on the wrist for the sort of thing we're talking about, and coming clean shouldn't be a get out of jail free card either, which brings with it all sorts of pathological behaviours as well

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#83

Post by dublidu »

eli wrote: post #22
rtpg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citigroup failing to send information on 26,810 transactions in over 2,300 such requests. 26810 requests, do you think they made more than $7m on this? It's about proportional fines. Just because they're a giant company doesn't mean we should find then $1b for forgetting to put a handicapped parking space at one of their offices.

There is a school of thought that punitive fines should be a proportion of company value/earnings rather than an absolute dollar figure to exact an equal amount of discomfort. I think Finnish speeding fines are a percent of income.

Large companies have more employees and will have more violations, maybe proportional to their size, whereas a rich person should not have more speeding tickets than a poor person and should arguably pay more per violation.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#84

Post by vostok »

kazinator wrote: post #27

Synopsis: SEC sends clear message to tech people in finance: shut the fuck up if you find something, silently fix it, and sweep the remaining crumbs under the rug, or else your company will be fined millions.

Isn't the lesson that you should blow the whistle? You could take home $700k to $2.1 mio, which is not bad for a back office developer. This is a lower bound because I'm sure the fine/reward would have been bigger if they didn't report it themselves.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#85

Post by AtheistOfFail »

PeCaN wrote: post #34
mherkender wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the bad kind of impressive, one where ATMs still run COBOL.

The bad kind of impressive would be getting running ATMs on NodeJS. ducks

May I introduce you to the "Lamassu Bitcoin ATM"?

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#86

Post by trequartista »

I have done bluesheet reporting code for another large bank and it is one of the most tedious things you can ever do in software. It's a report of all the trades that the bank does and the SEC can come back and ask for historical data at any point of time. So there's a huge database with feeds coming in from multiple trading systems. Usually these feeds have to be enriched with the right account numbers and so on. This needs lookups to other reference data systems, which frequently are changing because of changing regulations, growing businesses etc. I am not surprised this bug remained undetected for more than 15 years. The guys who coded this initially are probably long gone and nobody did knowledge transition of the fact that some account ranges are not test accounts, even though they look like test accounts.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#87

Post by lorenzhs »

trentnelson wrote: post #31
wil421 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to disagree on that part. The ATMs that the company I work for run Windows. We are the largest manufacturer, until the other 2 big ones finish merging. Besides, C is 44 years old and used on a ton of stuff.

Interesting. Windows CE? Are there any glaring technical issues you've run into over the years? What processors are the ATMs using?

I took this in the UK two years ago: https://4z2.de/atm_windows.jpg - I don't know enough about how the various versions of Windows look but maybe this helps.

It also doesn't look very trust-inspiring.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#88

Post by wpietri »

TruthAndDare wrote: post #79
ubernostrum wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a school of thought that punitive fines should be a proportion of company value/earnings rather than an absolute dollar figure to exact an equal amount of discomfort. In the infamous McDonald's coffee lawsuit, this was actually the motivation behind the initial large damage award. The jury attempted to award punitive damages equal to two days' worth of McDonald's coffee revenue. (obligatory note here for the…

> which is not generally what one expects from coffee I disagree. I think it's reasonable to expect that coffee and other hot drinks might be all the way up to boiling. > in a temperature range making burns more likely Is there a particular range for burns? Isn't it simply that the hotter it is, the more burns you get?

That sounds linear to me, which is not correct. Injury level is exponential with temperature:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18226454

Injury time is logarithmic:

http://www.accuratebuilding.com/services/legal/charts/hot_wa...

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#89

Post by hx87 »

rtpg wrote: post #40
ubernostrum wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a school of thought that punitive fines should be a proportion of company value/earnings rather than an absolute dollar figure to exact an equal amount of discomfort. In the infamous McDonald's coffee lawsuit, this was actually the motivation behind the initial large damage award. The jury attempted to award punitive damages equal to two days' worth of McDonald's coffee revenue. (obligatory note here for the…

Yeah though even then it was connected to the coffee revenue, right? I feel like this school of thought is also the one that ends up with things like "3 strikes and you're 25-to-life"

25-to-life is indeed excessive, but if some people had 25 year lifespans and others had 2500 year lifespans, "3 strikes and you're 10-25% of your lifespan" is actually quite reasonable.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#90

Post by hx87 »

dublidu wrote: post #83
eli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a school of thought that punitive fines should be a proportion of company value/earnings rather than an absolute dollar figure to exact an equal amount of discomfort. I think Finnish speeding fines are a percent of income.

Large companies have more employees and will have more violations, maybe proportional to their size, whereas a rich person should not have more speeding tickets than a poor person and should arguably pay more per violation.

That may have been true back in the 20th century, but not anymore--Apple and Walmart have market caps on the same order of magnitude, but one employs far more employees than the other. Besides, if you have more $ per employee, that just means each violation will cost more money/damage.
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