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Faulty Patch Freezes Millions of UK Bank Accounts
frisket writes with news from The Register about ongoing problems for some UK banks: "'RBS and Natwest have failed to register inbound payments for up to three days, customers have reported, leaving people unable to pay for bills, travel and even food. The banks — both owned by RBS Group — have confirmed that technical glitches have left bank accounts displaying the wrong balances and certain services unavailable. There is no fix date available.' Customers of NatWest subsidiary Ulster Bank in Ireland have also been left without banking services. RTE reports that 'the problem had arisen within the systems of parent bank RBOS when an incorrect patch was applied.'"
Where are those cleanmypc.com ads when you need them?
... getting rid of all the expensive people with experience in the mainframe backend system...
I always mess up some mundane detail.
They're doing tests on locking down funds transfer & electronic payments systems. This is probably much harder than you'd think, because they're designed to, well, just work. A few weeks ago (5th June, to be precise) a similar thing happened in Belgium. Caused chaos on the railways.
If anyone thinks it isn't a rehearsal for when Greece drops out of the Euro then I've got a nice bridge for sale.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I hate it when I can't food. We all need to food sometime.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
To prevent another run on UK banks.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And I've always wanted nothing to do with them. Banking in general is very distasteful to me.
Always have one. Test it in your testing environment and if it works correctly, deploy on live servers. server idiots guide 101 available in all stores right now
Well, they've always looked like a bunch of clowns.
They were always a bit useless. Then they kind of bought each other up to increase the lavel of failure when they went bust.
It's government owned now, but you can't blame the government for this computer foul up (there are many other even more spectacular ones), since it was all done by them before the bail out anyway.
The UK retail banking industry is a poster child for why private industry is every bit as crap as a government, and in fact often worse. The thing is that safe storage of money, like roads and the rule of law is one of those things which is essential for civilization. As such, it can't really be entrusted to private companies since the consequenes if they foul up are simply too big.
In conclusion, I hate them all. They're all useless. Some of them are rude too.
It would have been nice if they went bust except that me and a lot of people I know would have lost an awful lot. The only funny thing is that just as the Scottish independence moverment really started to gear up again, the UK (i.e. mostly England) bought all their banks!
It's all crap.
People suck.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As a customer, I'm annoyed that a) A major high street bank doesn't have enough failsafes/testing to prevent this and b) That there is so little communication as to the cause and expected time to fix the problem.
Thankfully I don't live week to week off my wage like some people do, but if I did I'd be having major problems as evidenced by some of the BBC stories.
When you remove a 1000 members of IT staff [many of which were probably your best] and replace them with 500 offshore workers combined with the need to support *legacy* systems, you are asking for trouble.
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280093677/Royal-Bank-of-Scotland-cuts-1000-IT-jobs
Regardless of the technical problems, the root cause of this seems to be management......
The summary says there's no fix date available, and I know that's what it says in the Register article, but the second article, linking to the bank's site, has this to say:
The bank says the issue has now been fixed but it will take the weekend to clear the backlog which amounts to millions of euro in transactions.
What makes you think they didn't, or that it didn't all go swimmingly up to that point?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
... move your money to another bank. I hope in UK they have smaller local banks like we have here in the former colonies. If not, maybe find some favorite small towns in the USA.
Cockup or conspiracy? Probably cockup - but quite likely they'll discover they've made more by hanging on to cash for a few extra days than this will cost them in customers.
I switched off NW/RBOS when I (banked with them since 1978) joined their online banking and saw .asp in their URL.
All your ghosts are just false positives.
It would appear that an update to CA-7 resulted in the actual schedule for these being corrupted or deleted. Therefore they do not know how much any customer actually has in their account, since accounts were not updated with transactions from the previous day.
The problem now appears to be fixed (read: update backed out and control datasets restored), but they still have to run through three days of unprocessed transactions, so people are not getting money paid in during these three days into their accounts as expected, resulting in misery.
This is something which should have been detected and fixed in a competent mainframe site very quickly indeed, so I imagine that the wisdom of outsourcing any "back-office" function of this nature is shortly going to be a matter of very close scrutiny.
Hope this helps.
Sometimes there's a limit to what you can test. Simulating a multilevel network with very broad trees, as a big bank probably uses, probably makes do with a significantly simplified environment. All it takes is some yutz somewhere to try to freeze an account that's already frozen (or do something else obtuse that's very hard to predict) to trigger an untested path bug and BOOM.
Being able to roll back a patch becomes a very useful feature at that point. But rolling back large amounts of financial transactions is a whole 'nother big can of worms.
Sometimes they just have to turn things on they shouldn't, to get the water flowing again, and try to clean up as best they can next weekend while they pour over the logs trying to catch things that got rolled back wrong etc. My bank had this happen once in their recent upgrades that I've caught, and it turned out to be a "bank error in your favor, collect $130". (they auto-paid a bill of mine and never debited my account) But that's the cheaper price they pay for screwing up. The alternative would be to let everyone know that they screwed up the books and are going to be fixing things for the next week, and that drops peoples' confidence in their bank which is incredibly bad for business at a bank, people really flip out when their bank tells them they don't quite know where all their money is right at the moment. So they just take a deep breath and take some little hits here and there to avoid much worse PR damage.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well, I don't know if it's still the case, but when I worked in banking IT in the late 80s here in the US there was a standing rule: if you don't process checks for more than 24 hours, you can be taken over by the Federal Reserve--where that takeover implies the possibility of being shut down and your assets distributed to other banks.
That really kept the fear of god in management with regard to keeping core IT running, backups, disaster recovery, etc. Daily offsite backups, periodically loading the backups at a backup facility and running test loads...
There should still be such a rule, and it should apply to electronic transactions as well as checks (not much difference anymore anyway), and the UK ought to adopt it. If a bank takes down its main system with a fucked-up patch, and can't get its disaster recovery plan working in 24 hours, shut it down.
I read the GP as saying that the story had validity given he's provided 3 links as sources. Maybe hold off on the fucking retard comments until you are sure you aren't yourself a fucking retard?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
That's not a bug for the bank, that's a feature!
Can I write a cheque? You do take cheques don't you?
Would you guys please quite insulting the retards by comparing them with these clowns? (Sorry all you clown people.)
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
These are absolutely core business systems; making decisions which turn out to compromise their smooth running is unforgivable. If I banked with any bank in the RBS group, I'd be out of there ASAP if this indicative of how they run their operations.
Billions of pounds? Sure. There's only a problem if you steal less than half a million, then you go to jail.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Suddenly Bitcoin becomes a real solution to avoid this kind of problem...
as a cashier, salesman, delivery boy, etc.
lest we forget, a huge number of the subprime mortgage securites (CDOs) had the "RBS" name on them. RBS only exists because the taxpayers kept it afloat. it was 'too big to fail'.
the fact that it would fail again in some catastrophic way is not surprising. it is like watching a hippopotamous shit all over the floor and then scratching your head and asking "why did the hippo shit all over the floor?". because thats what hippos do. they shit on the floor. if you want to stop having to wipe hippo shit out of the floor by the truckload, you might want to just get the hippo out of the room instead of trying to figure out how to get it to stop shitting.
that literally exists only because taxpayers funded it through government enforced bailouts.
methinks your anger is misplaced. please find an arena where the people who run RBS, Goldman, Morgan, Deutsche, and all of the other 'too big to fail' banks were propped up by taxpayer funding, and tell them that they should be "put to the wall".
look, all of the 'disgruntled customers' like yourself may be upset, but are you upset to take your money out and go to a smaller institution? one that charges slightly higher fees and has less profitable interest rates, but that actually takes it's job seriously?
this is the situation in the US with people who 'hate big banks'. if they 'hate' them so much, there are literally tens of thousands of small banks and credit unions - and they are insured up to $250,000 if you are worried about losing your money.
the thing is, customers would rather go with a big shitty bank, and then complain about getting screwed, than a small bank that always works. its some kind of pathological addiction to drama or something.
" I worked in banking IT in the late 80s"
if you want to know how things have changed, id start with any of the recent crisis books - "The Big Short" by Lewis, "Fool's Gold" by Tett, "Colossal Failure of Common Sense", by McDonald, "On the Brink", Paulson, "In Fed We Trust", Wessel, etc etc etc.
The stories about Citigroup and it's incestuous relationship with the high offices of government are of particular interest.
The Federal Reserve is kind of a joke as far as regulation goes. It does a lot of mole whacking, but you have to understand, we gave 2 trillion dollars to shitty banks that in essence, could not process transactions. We didn't "shut them down", we didnt "take them over". We bailed them out and payed their executives Bonuses.
Fannie and Freddie - still going strong. Executives still making millions.
JP Morgan - still dealing in Credit Default Swaps, with absolutely zero consequences
Morgan Stanley - still churning out shitty IPOs like Facebook that rip people for millions, with absolutely zero consequences
Goldman - still being Goldman
the hedge funds and investment banks can now give unlimited anonymous money to political campaigns. including banks that are essentially 'international' with no allegiance to the US or its constitution.
Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was linked to the Magnetar hedge fund that was near the center of the subprime bubble, and it faced absolutely zero consequenecs, its managers have faced essentially no inquiries whatsoever.
has some brilliant banking laws. A bank is required to be able to give a customer up to every cent of his money almost 24 hours per day immediately. This has resulted in faster money flow, better competition in banking, and a generally smoother economy. There are other perks like ATMs that cash out in denominations down to a single yen. Finally banks are unable to pull shit like creating branch withdrawal limits to screw over customers.
In Japan if I had a million dollars in an account and went to withdraw it by law they would have to have a money truck there within a matter of two hours. No excuses allowed.
They don't claim to still have it. Banks are very open about the fact that they lend out your money. That's why they can pay interest on accounts. That's why you keep your money in a bank. If you don't want it lent out, keep it at home.
have you ever actually been a cashier?
have you ever actually been a file clerk?
have you ever actually been a mail clerk?
have you ever actually been a salesman?
if not, then i suggest you go try it. you will learn a lot.
the system can fail regardless of how 'genius' the person you stick on the job.
witness the financial crash of 2008 - hundreds of PHDs were involved in creating CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, RMBS, and giving AAA+ ratings to migrant farm laborers with $300,000 home loans. all those geniuses didn't help the system one single bit, not at all, not one iota.
... is just expressing the truth.
The fact is that many (all?) banks outsource whole departments to "reputable" companies where the attrition rate is high, so what happens is that your systems end supported by a guy that had a week of certification on a given technology but no experience whatsoever with highly sensitive business systems.
If explaining this reality is biternees, so be it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The only thing you need to do to lock down funds is to shut down the website down in purpose, no need of conspiracy theories.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.