al Qaeda Hacks XP?

acaird writes "According to this article at Newbytes, members of al Qaeda may have worked for Microsoft and planted "trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP"." This stuff screams of hoax to me, but it is showing up on the Washington Post.

Comments

not as easy as you might think

[psyklopz]

Speaking as a programmer who works for a big software company, it's unlikely that anything like that would be able to get through.

Code generally goes through peer reviews and quality assurance before it is accepted into the main stream. Say waht you want about MS, but I'm sure they do these things (they can afford it!)

To bypass these failsafes would require a lot of people along the line allowing it to slip through.

Re:not as easy as you might think

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. All code gets peer reviewed, and it's also verified that the version that's peer reviewed is exactly what's under source control, and QA reads code? That's a fucking joke.

QA generally does not read any code at all, they take the specs for how a routine works, and maybe write some regression tests to make sure it does what it's supposed to, and breaks properly. There's no digging around in the code itself.

As for peer review, when it happens (which it doesn't for every line of code by a long shot) they don't make sure that nobody ever updates that code again without more peer review.

While I don't believe the allegation for a second, it's definitely extremely possible.

*sigh*

[szcx]

It screams of a hoax, so let's put it on the front page. Way to be part of the problem, Taco.

Not as easy as you might think

[Transient0]

Not to mention that the whole story is hanging on very tentative ground.

In the first place, I notice that man is a "suspected" Al Qaeda member. From what I've been seeing lately, anyone who has the wrong kind of accent or a copy of the Koran is a suspected Al Qaeda Member.

Secondly, if this man really is a member of the organization, it should be noted that bravado and misinformation are prime terrorist tactics. It's a lot easier to spread rumours about having planted bombs, or for that matter created software bugs, than it is to actually do it. And you still get the result of people being afraid to fly or afraid to use Windows.

Thirdly, as you said, even if some programmers with less than noble intentions did manage to get employed at Microsoft, the chance that they would be able to intentionally slip in a trojan horse without it being caught in testing are pretty low.

On the other hand, i suppose they couls just sabotage the american way of life by writing bad code, but then Microsoft pays people to do that anyway.