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Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

theregister.com

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Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#41

Post by eitally »

bangaroo wrote: post #14
duxup wrote: post #12

Are all these articles this "lightweight" and short on details and sound like a made up coding morality tale? Just the style here throws me.

i mean the register is kinda more of a tabloid than anything, it's real-ish news but with a loose and snarky editorial style, so... it's pretty on-brand.

El Reg is basically The Onion but targeted at enterprise IT. That said, for things in that domain -- like SAP or Oracle, but especially SAP -- they really do know their stuff and offer frequently insightful content.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#42

Post by seadan83 »

bjourne wrote: post #37
greenthrow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a true story because as a merchant you cannot "refuse chargebacks". In fact too many chargebacks will result in a loss of your merchant account. You should really stop making things up.

Sorry Sherlock, I meant charge back as in "refunds" not credit card disputes. Also, merry Christmas.

I recommend to edit your post with an "update" so others don't have to dig to find this clarifying comment

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#43

Post by whstl »

wruza wrote: post #30
whstl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not unheard of, unfortunately. Funny enough, in a fintech I worked for, developers and QAs actually used their own personal credit cards and bank accounts for testing. Interestingly, they also needed to test ApplePay, but the laptops didn't allow for adding their personal iCloud accounts. So someone in the development team got the "admin" password and distributed among devs and QA team, and they all had unprotected l…

I wonder if NOT providing a separate, exclusive account/card/sim etc to a developer is a common trope in fintech. I avoided linking my personal things like hell, and they avoided giving me a damn immutable plastic that would work/get paid for more than a few days. So much friction just because something stopped working or had to get back into oven and they had no replacement at hand. I even had to maintain a separate…

It's a ouroboros of bureaucracy getting in the way of security and security causing the bureaucracy itself.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#44

Post by Clubber »

I wrote a faxing queue because our fax server at the time was horrible at converting pdf's to fax appropriate tiff's. I didn't think to block an area code that was 911. The cops showed up when a user accidentally fat fingered 911 as an area code.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#45

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

This reminds me of the bug in the stealing script in Office Space. The script was supposed to steal fractions of a cent, but, instead, it was stealing dollars.

In the end, it turned out OK. The joint burned down, and Milton ended up on a beach, sans Swingline.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#46

Post by aristus »

RandallBrown wrote: post #32

I worked for a large retailer on their iPhone app and our test environments were terribly slow so we tended to do most of our development against production. This retailer is pretty old and had issued their own credit cards that didn't have any sort of checksum validation. This made making test orders easy because any sequence of numbers for that credit card type would let the "checkout" call succeed, and then the or…

They literally didn't have a Lunh check digit? Like, 1960s math? My gobs are smacked.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#47

Post by DowsingSpoon »

>Regomize is a made-up word that combines "The Register" and "Anonymize." We coined the term to reflect our practice of inventing names for contributors to On Call and its sibling column Who, Me?. We offer this explanation as in recent weeks we've had readers suggest the word is a spelling error.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#48

Post by marklar423 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #32

I worked for a large retailer on their iPhone app and our test environments were terribly slow so we tended to do most of our development against production. This retailer is pretty old and had issued their own credit cards that didn't have any sort of checksum validation. This made making test orders easy because any sequence of numbers for that credit card type would let the "checkout" call succeed, and then the or…

I worked on a large makeup website for a while, and it was common for us to place test orders and subsequently cancel them. The dev doing it usually put their name and the office address as the shipping address.

One day, we got a big box of makeup at the office - turns out their warehouse had gotten so fast that in the time it took us to cancel the order they had already picked & shipped it.

After that we put "TEST DO NOT SHIP TEST DO NOT SHIP" as the shipping name and "123 Fake St" as the address to try and avert this scenario, which seemed to work until we could modify the system to hide those orders from the warehouse entirely.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#49

Post by karim79 »

Working at a fortune 500 way back in 2011, I was assigned a ticket which was about asynchronously rotating an ad block at the top of a public search page on an extremely busy site.

There was a tiny bit of logic in there if I remember correctly, relating to when and whom to show the ad to.

I implemented it, tested in dev, assigned it to QA, QA approved it and rolled it out that afternoon.

The next morning when I showed up to work one of the other team leads walked straight up to me as I entered the campus, laughing hysterically.

Turned out that in production it behaved differently. The ad appeared, correctly. Then doubled every couple of seconds,1 ad, 2 ads, 4 ads and so on, until the client browser exploded into flames.

As luck would have it there was zero consequence, only chuckles all over the place. It was something to do with order of inclusion of a mad number of js libraries which differed in production and went unnoticed. The End.

Re: Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

#50

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

I wrote industrial control software that bumped a very expensive piece of equipment against the wall because I miscalculated the encoder position. Since then, special limit switches were added, colloquially known as anti-EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK switches.
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