Coder Wrote A Bug So Bad Security Guards Wanted A Word
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
This week's hero we'll Regomize as "Trey" because back in the first decade of this millennium he was working for one of the many startup telcos trying to cash in on 3G. (Sadly, he tells Who, Me? it was not one of the ones that succeeded.)
Trey worked on the platforms and services team, which created and maintained apps for internal users and customers. Among his responsibilities was working with external service providers, such as a payment provider, an identity services outfit, and bulk SMS handler.
One day, Trey noticed the payments gateway misbehaving, so he wrote a piece of software that sent it a test transaction, checked it had worked, then repeated the process five minutes later.
Another experiment saw him write a demo app that automated payments, using SMS as prompts.
The app had its own syntax for commands. In theory, the message Credit 5" would send that sum to an account, and so on.
Trey showed the automated payments applications to the head of his department, who was well pleased - so pleased he asked for it to be deployed immediately.
Oh yeah, immediate deployment. That never goes wrong, right?
Wrong. It turns out Trey's little demo had exactly three bugs in it that had not been spotted in his limited testing.
[...] When he arrived at work the next morning, there were some very serious faces - including a security team - waiting to greet him and find out what sort of fraud he thought he was trying to pull. The account had amassed a considerable fortune by that stage.
Thankfully the head of department, who had authorized the deployment, came to Trey's rescue and explained the situation. Tragically, though, the balance of the test account was reset to zero.
Ever had a programming error make a fortune appear - or disappear - like magic? Tell us all about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may share your adventure on some future Monday morning.
Before you submit it to them, do any of you Soylentils have stories to share of pushing buggy code to production that failed so quickly?
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