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Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

businessinsider.com

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#101

Post by Kon-Peki »

digianarchist wrote: post #45
bearjaws wrote: post #9

Reminds me back at a certain large travel website I worked at, someone left the debug promo codes enabled in prod... Eventually someone found the "5000off" code, and posted it to Slickdeals. We had alarms for bookings that lost us money (especially with bundled flights), so it was found relatively quickly, but around 30 people had used it already... Except SBF was just massive fraud, not a whoopsie doopsie.

How did they find the code? Brute force?

> How did they find the code?

They had a MBP with a butterfly keyboard

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#102

Post by lowkeyokay »

lmkg wrote: post #77
sirsinsalot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a debugging code so it being large isn't an issue

A QA walks into a bar, orders a beer, pays with a $5,000-off coupon. Test passes

Maybe it was for testing the alarm

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#103

Post by lolinder »

eddsh1994 wrote: post #95
delaaxe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure their whole stack was in Python

Their tech team almost exclusively came from Jane Street, wouldn’t it be OCaml?

OCaml still wouldn't have 16 bit ints.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#104

Post by loufe »

fragmede wrote: post #97
beaned wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some specific accounts were hard-coded to have credit lines of certain amounts, and they just changed the one for Alameda from 0 (or whatever) to 65 billion. Not uncommon for a startup to hack features into code directly before there's a db column and frontend to support updating values through an admin interface.

we're also basing a lot off a reporter's interpretation. Inserting a value into the database by hand would probably have similar effects and still be "programming".

This is very likely a big factor. It could very possibly just be embellishment, as well.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#105

Post by pacaro »

bearjaws wrote: post #9

Reminds me back at a certain large travel website I worked at, someone left the debug promo codes enabled in prod... Eventually someone found the "5000off" code, and posted it to Slickdeals. We had alarms for bookings that lost us money (especially with bundled flights), so it was found relatively quickly, but around 30 people had used it already... Except SBF was just massive fraud, not a whoopsie doopsie.

The hoover free flights promotion is a good cautionary tale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotio...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#106

Post by [deleted] »

voganmother42 wrote: post #60
korroziya wrote: post #35

I don't see it mentioned in the article but is SBF still doing the "dumb blonde" act as though this were all an unintended accident or have his lawyers gotten him to tighten his lip?

“Dumb blonde” is not useful and such a silly stretch…I don’t think this was a good choice for a description of his actions and weakens the potential impact of your comment considerably.

[deleted]

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#109

Post by tobyjsullivan »

Centigonal wrote: post #24
tsimionescu wrote: post #12

Interestingly, while some are quoting a "single line of code", the article is actually using some even stranger information: > "Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code [emphasis mine] for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," [FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich] added. "And we know the size of that line of credit…

$65B seems oddly specific - could it be that they just set the liquidation limit for Alameda's account to 65,535 (max 16bit unsigned int), in millions of dollars?

Reading between the lines (and pattern matching), my interpretation is it’s likely a line that prevents balances going below zero. The number was an account number which was exempted from that particular check.

The $65B figure probably leads somewhere else and sounds like it would be counting bitcoins which peaked at over $65k per coin.

If there was some other limit that prevented his balance from falling below -$1M BTC, then Alameda “had access to” over $65B in credit (in October 2021)

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says

#110

Post by tru3_power »

digianarchist wrote: post #45
bearjaws wrote: post #9

Reminds me back at a certain large travel website I worked at, someone left the debug promo codes enabled in prod... Eventually someone found the "5000off" code, and posted it to Slickdeals. We had alarms for bookings that lost us money (especially with bundled flights), so it was found relatively quickly, but around 30 people had used it already... Except SBF was just massive fraud, not a whoopsie doopsie.

How did they find the code? Brute force?

If 5OFF worked why not try 500/5000off?
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