Computer bugs can be embarrassing, costly, time-consuming, and frustrating. But these examples prove that they can be much worse than you ever imagined. Here are the worst computer bugs in history, along with all the trouble those little buggers caused.
1. The Mariner Mission to Venus in 1962
.jpg "Software bugs")
3 … 2 … 1 … uh oh …
In 1962, as the U.S. smarted from the sting of the Soviets beating them with Sputnik, NASA decided to send an unmanned mission to Venus. For the lack of a single punctuation mark (that has been described as a hyphen, but was actually a superscript bar), the craft veered radically off course and threatened to enter the North Atlantic shipping routes. Less than five minutes into its doomed flight, it was shot down to prevent further property damage and potential casualties. That was one expensive punctuation mark.
2. Soviet Gas Pipeline in 1982
Most bugs are accidental, but the one that caused the Soviet gas pipeline to blow up was likely done on purpose. At the time, the Cold War was raging. Soviets were trying to buy as much U.S. technology as possible and steal what they couldn’t purchase. According to some sources, the CIA deliberately created plans for a pipeline that would pass Soviet inspection but would fail during actual operations. The Soviets bought the plans from a Canadian source, and the pipeline did explode in 1982. Fortunately, there were no casualties.
3. The AT&T Network Outage in 1990
Some bugs unfortunately attack the safeguards in place to prevent them from perpetrating themselves, as AT&T discovered when they released a software update for their long distance switches in 1990. A bug in the update caused the switches to crash when they received a message from another switch that it was back online after recovering from a crash. So one switch crashed, recovered, and sent messages to the others, which in turn crashed and recovered, sending even more messages … you see the problem. For about 9 hours, approximately 60,000 AT&T customers were without servers while 114 long distance switches crashed and rebooted every six seconds. AT&T had to reinstall the previous version of the software to make it stop.
4. Kerberos Random Number Generator from 1998 to 1996
In order for random numbers to be used for security, they actually have to be real random numbers. In the case of the Kerberos Random Number Generator, this wasn’t actually the case. The system wasn’t seeded properly by the programmers, and for eight full years it was a simple matter to break into any system that depended on Kerberos authentication. No one is sure if this particular bug was actually exploited, but it could have potentially been devastating.
5. Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998
Another bug? No problem! NASA has money to burn.
Since NASA is almost as notable for their epic failures as for their astounding success stories, they actually make the worst computer bugs in history list twice. In 1998, they built a craft that was supposed to go into orbit over Mars and deliver insightful information on the planet’s climate. There were multiple teams working on the project, which wasn’t a problem. But some of the workers used English pound forces as a measurement while others used the metric Newton seconds. This was a problem. The error resulted in thrusters that were more than four times too powerful, crashing the orbiter instead of placing it into orbit.
Computer bugs will happen — it’s just part of being human. Hopefully, none of yours will be quite so grand or devastating. One excellent protection against the havoc of computer bugs is regular and complete system backups. While backing up can’t stop the bugs, it can restore your systems to normalcy after one causes problems.
The post 5 of the World’s Worst Software Bugs Ever appeared first on BACKBOX BLOG.