Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like they only lost $661k worth, which is peanuts by comparison to most other crypto hacks/losses, probably didn't destroy the entire company since they're compensating their users, and not really worthy of the sensational title.
Apparently 95% of that money was by the company itself or employees of the company. So the loss for normal users is very limited.
OptiFi Program Incident Report
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a technical solution to a psychological and organizational problem: when there should be no CLI in production, people still use it and get used to various errors and confirmations so much, that they ignore the signs of a catastrophe. Technical solutions never work in such cases. And then there's a regulatory problem: investors trust their money to businesses which have not earned that trust, because of whateve…
> no CLI in production It seems like this was in the "deploy to production" stage, and there has to be some mechanism for doing that. (It also seems unnecessarily complicated; I'd appreciate a plaintext explainer of what actually went wrong)
Normally such deployment mechanism is one standard command that picks up a tested code, enriches it with environment configuration and rolls it out. This command rarely changes and should be the same as deployment to pre-production or staging. This command is usually executed from a CI tool via a button click and requires only user credentials as an input.
Any changes to production must be tested before release. They did not do it.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#53Commands like that really need a confirmation prompt and a command line switch to override like --do-as-i-say (long form only). Good example of developers being put in an end user's shoes, I hope they learn from that mistake and update their programs.
An example of such a command came up on Linus Tech Tips (LTT), from apt (IIRC) on Pop_OS!. Basically (paraphrasing) "this will destroy your system and render it useless; type 'I'm an idiot and wish to proceed'". Our eponymous youtuber went right on, typed the phrase and blitzed the system, and then moaned about how the system shouldn't have let him break it ... I suspect such prompts only work for cautious people, wh…
In his defense, it was literally the first package he tried to install, which was in the official repositories but horribly broken, so he had no real way to tell whether this was the normal flow and linux just made it really irritating to install packages.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is missing the point to a degree that makes me think you're being intentionally obtuse, but maybe you're just ignorant so I'll bite. Banking computer errors can easily be rectified by humans, banks are regulated, your funds are at least partially guaranteed by the government (depending on where you live). The degree to which you're trusting computer programs with your finances is orders of magnitude less than wi…
CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues... You can say that's an edge case today but I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future.
>CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company.
Given it was an accidental early repayment of a loan, this isn't quite the slam dunk you think it is. If they had paid a company they didn't owe money to, they could get the money back through the courts.
Crypto is meant to evade those courts.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
rm -rf / Whoops, I lost everything! Computers are useless.
You can recover from that by restoring from backups. In the crypto world all changes are permanent and immutable. There is no recourse. That’s the difference.
But there is, even in cases like this. Circle could issue new USDC for example. No technical barrier to a remedy like that.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#56This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's when most crypto companies right now are very small. Can you imagine the chaos if crypto were to actually become big and dev count were to grow to 1k+ people spread across multiple offices? There's definite efficiency gains with crypto (a dex like Uniswap can do massive volume with very few developers for instance…
It's not exactly unique to crypto... in adtech, a configuration mistake on a web server can cost 6-7 figures as ads are being paid for, but take people nowhere.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#57Man, if only there was a central authority to appeal those mistakes.
It’s Solana, so there kinda is. It’s pretty much centralized.
This sort of thing is not exclusive to Solana. Ethereum will also join Solana and be another highly centralized PoS network, so I expect more of the same centralization points to apply to Ethereum and many other chains.
As for this issue, just look no further than the DAO hack and see if that has taught crypto anything about so-called decentralization; clearly it hasn't.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#58Commands like that really need a confirmation prompt and a command line switch to override like --do-as-i-say (long form only). Good example of developers being put in an end user's shoes, I hope they learn from that mistake and update their programs.
Command line switches like that won't, IMO and IME, make developers think "wow, I'm so glad this exists to guard against footguns". Rather they'll just set an alias to get around it. Likewise confirmation prompts albeit with a little more resitance. Once a repeat user is frustrated enough they'll bust out `expect` or similar, angry at the original command for mollycoddling them because they know what they're doing an…
If you alias a —do-as-i-say switch to a command without wrapping into a script to make sanity checks of your own, IMO that’s negligence. The name of the flag should make you think thrice about invoking it without safety checks.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
rm -rf / Whoops, I lost everything! Computers are useless.
I mean that won't work, because --preserve-root is on by default. In the same way, eventually crypto may acquire the same checks and balances that other industries have, but it'll take a lot of costly mistakes to get to that point.
Preserve root exists now, but it didn’t exist in the past.
Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report
#60This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's when most crypto companies right now are very small. Can you imagine the chaos if crypto were to actually become big and dev count were to grow to 1k+ people spread across multiple offices? There's definite efficiency gains with crypto (a dex like Uniswap can do massive volume with very few developers for instance…
It's not exactly unique to crypto... in adtech, a configuration mistake on a web server can cost 6-7 figures as ads are being paid for, but take people nowhere.
Sure, but the company managing the ad network can choose to be gentle, and refund the money. With these sorts of crypto mistakes, the money is just gone, because humans are -- as a desired feature of the system -- unable to correct these sorts of mistakes.