Sometimes a small mistake or a bug can cause very serious damage. In this article, we will look at some types of mistakes that are made when creating/maintaining software that have been responsible for damages running into a few million dollars.
The "Morris Worm" is one such case. A "worm" is understood to be a self-contained malware computer program that multiplies and spreads to other computers. This was a very short but dangerous bug initially written by a graduate student named Morris. Its popularity gained emphasis as it inspired the introduction of a new layer of computer security - Internet security. This was the first worm to break into the Internet and damage another computer without a cable or physical medium, programmed to exploit weak passwords and phrases.
The "Y2k" bug is also another such example. At least in a direct way, this bug was not responsible for millions of dollars spent, but it did cause numerous costs due to the fear caused in people.
With the arrival of the year 2000, much of humanity was afraid of a mistake that had been made in previous decades. To understand this bug, it is necessary to understand the metric system that we have now and the one that existed before to calculate everything related to time, including research, statistics, etc. Currently, the entire system is changed to a constant year number (date). The year number we live in is, of course, 2022 and the computer considers it as 2022, however, this is not how numbering worked before: Before the advent of computers, people did not have a long-term thought process about how dates could be numbered, and so until now only the first 2 digits of the date of the year in which they lived were used. Which means that for someone living in 1998, the computer would only consider 98 as the important part and discard the other 2 digits.
So, starting in the year 2000, many people thought that the numbers would start overlapping, and that consequently computers would start transmitting incorrect information, thus leading to a certain desperation and urgency to buy or sell this hardware. However, the reality is that none of this actually happened. In the first few days, most companies simply changed their system of dates and the way they process them, and everything went back to normal.
It is estimated that all this fear generated is responsible for a loss of more than 1.2 million dollars, and that if this bug had in fact occurred as expected, this loss could reach 200 billion dollars.
Finally, "Mt. Gox" - the world's largest bitcoin transaction in the 2010s, until it was hit by a software bug that proved fatal. The problem revealed itself every time a money transaction occurred: the request would be sent to the servers, although due to a program error, the transaction would ultimately not happen, thus causing an estimated loss of $1.5 million for the senders and recipients of these monies.
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