List of sample errors

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The list of program error examples shows some examples of program errors viewed in the media , is sorted according to industries (user groups) and describes their consequences.

Aerospace

  • In the case of the F-16 fighter aircraft , the autopilot put the aircraft on its back when the equator was flown over. This was because no "negative" latitudes were considered as input data. This bug was discovered and eliminated very late in the development of the F-16 using a simulator.
  • On June 4, 1996, the first Ariane 5 rocket (start number V88) of the European Space Agency blew itself up automatically 40 seconds after launch at a height of four kilometers. The program code for (among other things) the pre-launch alignment was taken over from the Ariane 4 , continued to run unnecessarily after the launch and only works in a horizontal speed range that the Ariane 4 cannot exceed . When the Ariane 5 left this area because it reached higher horizontal speeds than the Ariane 4, the error affected the inertial control systems and these largely switched off. During the programming there was an error with the type conversion . When the float was converted to an integer and the value reached 32,768, an overflow occurred . This overflow could actually have been discovered and handled by the Ada programming language used. However , those responsible had this security functionality switched off. The damage was about $ 370 million.
  • In 1999, NASA 's Mars Climate Orbiter probe missed its approach to Mars because the programmers used different measurement systems (one team used the metric and the other the Anglo-American ), which resulted in incorrect calculations when exchanging data. A piece of software was programmed in such a way that it did not adhere to the agreed interface, in which the metric unit Newton × second was specified. As a result, NASA lost the probe.
  • When the  new Delta 3 rocket, planned to be the successor to the Delta 2, was launched in 1998, 75 seconds after the launch it was inclined to the direction of flight and had to be blown up. The control software was taken from Delta 2, but this led to a wrong interpretation regarding a 4 Hz natural oscillation in the roll direction within the hydraulic control systems of the booster rockets.
  • The Hitomi space telescope, which cost several hundred million euros, rotated too quickly at the end of March 2016 after a chain of software errors and was lost. The software had incorrectly assumed an undesirable slow rotation of the satellite and tried to compensate for the apparent rotation by taking countermeasures. The signals from the redundant control systems were misinterpreted, and finally the satellite was rotated more and more until it finally broke because of the excessive centrifugal forces .

medicine

  • Between 1985 and 1987 there were several accidents with the Therac-25 medical radiation device . Organs had to be removed and three patients died as a result of an overdose caused by incorrect programming and lack of safety measures.

trade

  • In December 2014, software was working “incorrectly”, which automatically sets product prices depending on the price of the competition. On the marketplace of the online mail order company Amazon , the sales prices of many retailers for hundreds of products have been set to £ 0.01. Some providers threatened to lose tens of thousands of pounds, and some feared the breakdown could drive them into bankruptcy.

traffic

  • On March 12, 1995, there were massive delays in nationwide train traffic due to a stack memory in the software of a Hamburg interlocking that was too small by a few bytes. The backup system was also switched off for safety reasons. On December 16, 2009 there was a similar error in the signal box at Hanover Central Station .
  • According to the Navy, the USS Yorktown , a largely computerized Ticonderoga-class ship , drifted helplessly in the Mediterranean for almost three hours during a maneuver in September 1997 after an engineer entered 0 directly into the database to correct a faulty entry on a sensor . The software used this value for divisions, which resulted in " division by zero " errors, which were not correctly intercepted by the software . As the process progressed, the system's temporary memory filled up and when it was full, the adjacent memory area, that of the drive system, was overwritten when it overflowed . The drive system and the computer network , which consisted of several Windows NT servers, failed because the error had spread across the network. It took over three hours to reanimate the servers.
  • At Toll Collect there were drastic delays with contractual penalties and revenue losses running into billions in 2003, among other things due to the lack of compatibility of software modules .
  • In the USA a security expert had registered "zero" as the license plate number. This term is used in many IT systems as an indicator for the absence of a value and could only be entered due to a program error. This actually inadmissible license plate number has therefore led to the owner receiving parking tickets for which no license plate number was recorded.

Finance

  • At the beginning of November 2005 no trading could be carried out on the Tokyo Stock Exchange for hours due to a system error. In the following weeks there were also many incorrect security orders ; in one case, there was even financial damage of over $ 300 million. The president of the exchange, Takuo Tsurushima , then resigned from his office.
  • In August 2012, Knight Capital lost more than $ 440 million in 45 minutes to a bug in its stock trading software. A new trading program flooded the market with erroneous trading orders and piled up a mountain of over-bought stocks. The subsequent rescue of the company by investors cost the previous owners 70 to 75 percent of their shares in the company.
  • In October and November 2012, difficulties arose during the migration to a new core banking system in Bank Austria's online banking systems . The system could not be reached for another day after the 2-day changeover phase, had to be restarted several times and was still partially inaccessible for days after the changeover, often overloaded and therefore slow. ATMs did not work, transfers were incorrectly carried out and the new user interface was criticized as being too confusing and complicated. In addition to the assurance that it would cover any reminder fees, Bank Austria offered its OnlineBanking and BusinessNet customers vouchers worth € 30 each, a total of € 21 million.

communication

military

  • In October 2007, ten members of the South African army were killed by a fully automated 35 mm anti-aircraft gun. A defective computer system was suspected to be the cause.

Information technology

  • The so-called box model bug in Internet Explorer meant that many web designers had to write special instructions for this browser, as the program incorrectly interpreted dimensions for website elements.
  • With the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL , parts of the other side's main memory could be read out via TLS and DTLS connections .
  • Some malware tests the accessibility of randomly generated Internet addresses ( ping ) before executing the malicious code . In test environments , the accessibility of all Internet addresses is often simulated, regardless of their real existence. In this case, the malware should deactivate itself in order not to perform any traceable actions in a test environment. In the case of the WannaCry ransomware , which spread worldwide on May 12, 2017 , this (presumed) anti-analysis measure was implemented incorrectly: the tested Internet address was hard-coded in the program and was therefore always the same. Therefore, the actual registration of this domain could stop the worldwide wave of distribution - although this was not originally the intention.

Errors at the turn of the year

  • Before the turn of the year 1999/2000, the year 2000 problem was an issue for IT because the IT applications in use could not correctly process the year data for the year 2000 and higher (mostly due to only 2-digit storage) or because this capability was not known and had to be checked. The design decisions for this were mostly made many years ago and were known to developers, users and management in principle, but the 'errors' did not come to light (when processing dates from 1900 to 1999). Worldwide, this became the “most serious and expensive (human) error to date in dealing with (high-tech) EDP systems”, which led almost all IT users to projects that, according to various estimates, total “up to 800 billion US dollars Expenditure ”caused, to a large extent, only to check the year 2000 capability, if necessary for its production. Nevertheless, the occurrence of errors could not always be prevented:
The “up to 800 billion US dollar expenditure” cannot, however, be directly assessed as the “cost of a bug”, as often clearly outdated software had been used and adapted over decades, the replacement and reprogramming of which was originally planned well before the year 2000 . A re-programming that was actually planned was postponed - these costs were therefore not 'error costs', but rather costs for replacing software, caused in connection with Y2K. Nevertheless: "According to many experts, is Y2K the G rößte A nzunehmende U Nfall - GAU - information technology".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History of software errors . ( Memento of the original from August 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. certitudo; Retrieved November 23, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.certitudo-gmbh.de
  2. ^ I. Giese: Lecture on Software Reliability. ( Memento of the original from February 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research , including an excerpt from the causative source code @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www-aix.gsi.de
  3. ↑ Nasa report on the investigation into the accident ( memento of the original from October 27, 2009) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) p. 16 “MCO Root Cause” @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ftp.hq.nasa.gov
  4. ↑ Mars Climate Orbiter - inches and feet instead of meters . astronews.com, October 1, 1999; Retrieved November 23, 2012
  5. ↑ Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer / Scienceblog: The swinging end of Delta III. In: Golem.de . November 24, 2015, accessed November 30, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Software error doomed Japanese Hitomi spacecraft. Nature, March 28, 2016, accessed May 6, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Matthias Delbrück: X-ray eye loses wings - Astro-H / Hitomi space observatory is lost after avoidable software errors. In: Physics Journal. Number 6, June 2016, p. 13.
  8. ^ Nancy G. Leveson, Clark S. Tyler: An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents. In: Computer. Volume 26, No. 7, 1993, ISSN  0018-9162 , pp. 18-14.
  9. ↑ Heise Newsticker Hundreds of goods sold for a penny. heise.de
  10. ^ Software disasters - Hamburg signal box. ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 221 kB)
  11. ^ Software breakdown: chaos at Hanover main station
  12. ↑ René Lotz: Notorious Software Bugs - USS Yorktown . (PDF; 135 kB) Seminar paper, Institute for Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau (2003)
  13. ↑ Toll Collect press release  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.toll-collect.de  
  14. ↑ Custom license plate: Why "zero" is not a good license plate - Golem.de. Retrieved on August 14, 2019 (German).
  15. ↑ Tokyo Stock Exchange - The boss resigns . In: Manager Magazin , December 20, 2005
  16. ↑ Stock trading software gambled away $ 440 million in 45 minutes . heise.de; Retrieved August 9, 2012
  17. ↑ The background to the online chaos at Bank Austria
  18. ↑ derstandard.at
  19. ↑ wirtschaftsblatt.at ( Memento from October 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Faulty software prevents reception of ORF programs . ORF, August 22, 2007
  21. ↑ Server failure brings nationwide telecommunications lines to a standstill - Tagesspiegel from October 30, 2007
  22. ↑ Online FOCUS - Hundreds of thousands of "wrongly connected"
  23. ↑ heise online - Defective computer system responsible for the death of ten soldiers?
  24. ↑ Heise Newsticker Ransomware WannaCry: Security expert finds "kill switch" - by chance heise.de Standard approach of the malware analyst:

    "1. Look for unregistered or expired C2 domains [(= unregistered malware control server domains)] belonging to active botnets and point it to our sinkhole (a sinkhole is a server designed to capture malicious traffic and prevent control of infected computers by the criminals who infected them ).
    2. Gather data on the geographical distribution and scale of the infections, including IP addresses, which can be used to notify victims that they're infected and assist law enforcement.
    3. Reverse engineer the malware and see if there are any vulnerabilities in the code which would allow us to take-over the malware / botnet and prevent the spread or malicious use, via the domain we registered. "

    - ( How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber ​​Attacks , malwaretech.com (English))

    It was therefore assumed that the domain was a "malware control server", which has not (yet) been registered.

  25. ↑ a b The responsibility of the computer… (PDF; 158 kB) Science-softcon
  26. ↑ Y2K problems
  27. ^ Computer disaster: The New Year's Eve chaos at the Berlin fire department . heise-online, June 16, 2000; Retrieved November 29, 2012
  28. ↑ Year 2000 problem - and it is still turning . ( Memento of the original from August 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Computerwoche , January 14, 2000; Retrieved November 29, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.computerwoche.de
  29. ↑ Japanese Unhappy About 9 y2k Malfunctions in Nuke Plants . In: Computerwoche , January 14, 2000; Retrieved November 29, 2012
  30. ↑ Y2K Bugs Reported Between December 30, 1999 and February 19, 2000 . Boogie online; Retrieved November 29, 2012
  31. ↑ Y2K bug briefly affected US terrorist monitoring effort, Pentagon says .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. CNN Tech January 5, 2000; Retrieved November 29, 2012@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / articles.cnn.com  
  32. ↑ Gerd K. Hartmann: The responsibility of the computer: a challenge for education and science . (PDF) accessed on October 28, 2015
  33. ↑ Breakdown at the turn of the year . In: Der Tagesspiegel . January 5, 2010.