It seems that software bugs are here to stay. Today, I will keep you people engage in reading Worst Software Bugs of all time, or we can say Worst Tech Software bugs. So read them, and wonder how it happens. Here is the chronological order of all the Worst Software Bugs.
July 28, 1962 — Mariner I space probe.
A bug in the flight software for the Mariner 1 causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch.
1982 — Soviet gas pipeline.
Operatives working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency allegedly plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline.
1985-1987 — Therac-25 medical accelerator.
A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities.
1988 — Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon.
The first internet worm infects between 2,000 and 6,000 computers in less than a day by taking advantage of a buffer overflow.
1988-1996 — Kerberos Random Number Generator.
Authors of the Kerberos security system neglected “seed” the program’s random number generator with a truly random seed. As a result, for eight years it is possible to trivially break into any computer that relies on Kerberos for authentication.
January 15, 1990 — AT&T Network Outage.
Bug in a new release of the software that controls AT&T’s #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash when they receive a specific message from one of their neighboring machines.
1993 — Intel Pentium floating point divide.
A silicon error causes Intel’s highly-promoted Pentium chip to make mistakes when dividing floating-point numbers that occur within a specific range. With an estimated 3 to 5 million were defective chips. The bug ultimately costs Intel $475 million.
1995/1996 — The Ping of Death.
A lack of sanity checks and error handling in the IP fragmentation reassembly code made it possible to crash a wide variety of operating systems by sending a malformed “ping” packet from anywhere on the internet.
June 4, 1996 — Ariane 5 Flight 501.
Working code for the Ariane 4 rocket is reused in the Ariane 5, but the Ariane 5′s faster engines trigger a bug in an arithmetic routine inside the rocket’s flight computer. The error is in the code that converts a 64-bit floating-point number to a 16-bit signed integer.
November 2000 — National Cancer Institute, Panama City.
In a series of accidents, therapy planning software created by Multidata Systems International, a U.S. firm, miscalculated the proper dosage of radiation for patients undergoing radiation therapy.
While going through these bugs, which one you liked? Well personally I like the Therac-25 bug. There are many other worst software bugs as well. I would like to unveil them some other time.
via [Wired]
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