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Programming Bug Costs Citigroup $7M After Legit Transactions Mistaken For Test Data For 15 Years (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register:A programming blunder in its reporting software has led to Citigroup being fined $7m. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete "blue sheet" information for a remarkable 15 years -- from May 1999 to April 2014. The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on. That team quickly noticed that some branches' trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn't until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.The glitch resided in new alphanumeric branch codes that the bank had introduced in the mid-1990s. The program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes. The report adds, "But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC."
EBCIDIC
As would having a separate system for testing, rather than trying to create a test island within your actual real live [that's enough - Ed] production system.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They could just be comparing the strings dictionary order:
if ((strcmp(x, "089") > 0) && (strcmp(x, "100") < 0))
{
filter_test_data(x);
}
The above works for ASCII, but not EBCDIC
"He was paid well to provide software that functioned to the defined spec, and he failed to do that."
Not correct at all. The software (apparently) worked well according to the original specification. Then they extended their business to open new branches, but did not adequately update the software. Not a problem of the programmer, but a problem of change management. You could just as well complain that your toy tricycle is not safe on the highway - possibly quite correct, but it's your fault if you are operating it outside its specification ("use only by children up to 30 kg on the sidewalk"), not the tricycle engineers problem.
Stephan