Coder Wrote A Bug So Bad Security Guards Wanted A Word When He Arrived At Work
The Register, Monday, December 16th, 2024
Working for a startup is supposed to end with getting rich overnight, but not like this
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.