This one brought up yet another tech memory to share from the past. I was the founding architect of a real-time payments company in the mid 1990s which at the t

This one brought up yet another tech memory to share from the past. I was the founding architect of a real-time payments company in the mid 1990s which at the time was processing for a very well known, even to this day, ‘use your email to pay’ company. My position as the architect and critical core software developer brought me into many problems that were others, both in business and in technology. As the leading technology based payment processor at that time along with our large volume we had a relationship with a bank that had another smaller processor which suffered a breach, one of the first widely reported. This smaller processor was "consumed" by us, unknown why nor can I recall atm but back then it was much different working with the large card brands and banks, and we therefore were transferred all their assets including source code. I was tasked with finding the areas of compromise within the software systems designs having already rearchitected our core systems to XML and microservices long before such ideas were even considered. In performing a source code review of what was a monolith written entirely in Visual Basic 6 I discovered whoever had written it decided that they would treat themselves to much greater than 25K of real fiat currency. Someone had added to the if statement on checking the credit card number that upon matching a specific series of numerics no outbound card brand API call was made and this transaction was auto approved, no other checks, and this code was in production. Those reading this far can likely deduce the potential of such a single if statement.