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> I'd set up a write-only logging system to be used for auditing company systems I bet Marc Karpeles had 5 people calling him at once that the trading engine w

by drcode 12y ago

> I'd set up a write-only logging system to be used for auditing company systems I bet Marc Karpeles had 5 people calling him at once that the trading engine was down again so THAT's where he put is efforts... He didn't get any calls from people saying "By the way, I hope you have robust auditing procedures." Like some people live paycheck to paycheck, I'm betting the MtGox guys were living from critical bug report to critical bug report, without time for "luxuries" like "atomicity" or "database auditing" (Let me say up front I am in no way intending for my comments to be a defense of the behavior of these criminals.)

patio11 12y ago
It has been credibly alleged [+] that Mt. Gox's general level of engineering acumen can be summed up as "No tests, no staging environment, live coding by SSHing into production." [+] Unnamed employee of Tibanne, the parent company which supplied substantially all of 0-employee Mt. Gox's staffing: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2105920/lost-in-translation-the-tangled-tale-of-mt-goxs-missing-millions.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2105920/lost-in-translation-t...
- gst 12y ago
  On the topic of SSH: It appears that they used their own version of SSH reimplemented in PHP: https://web.archive.org/web/20140102104411/http://blog.magicaltux.net/2010/06/27/php-can-do-anything-what-about-some-ssh https://web.archive.org/web/20140102104411/http://blog.magic...
Pyxl101 12y ago
True, but a system like I'm describing ought not to be terribly complicated to set up. Perhaps it's simply a remote syslog daemon under the control of a trusted exec. Preferably offsite or in a separate cage. Or if SAAS, under a distinct account. Maybe we don't block transactions on writing to the log, but whenever discrepancies are detected of more than a short time (transactions more than 60 seconds old not appearing), we page all founders and senior leaders. The trading engine stays up, but we draw much attention to the logging outage. (I'd also want controls like offline wallets and accounts that would prevent an attacker from obliterating our assets in a single withdrawal)
tyrfing 12y ago
I'd like to note that Gonzague Gay-Bouchery is an oft-ignored part of this saga. He has gone to a lot of effort to silently vanish (deleting most of his online footprint just before the announcement last February) and has been mostly ignored, but reportedly had a large role in the business side of Mtgox, while Karpeles handled the code aspects.

by drcode 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

It has been credibly alleged [+] that Mt. Gox's general level of engineering acumen can be summed up as "No tests, no staging environment, live coding by SSHing into production." [+] Unnamed employee of Tibanne, the parent company which supplied substantially all of 0-employee Mt. Gox's staffing: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2105920/lost-in-translation-the-tangled-tale-of-mt-goxs-missing-millions.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2105920/lost-in-translation-t...

gst 12y ago
On the topic of SSH: It appears that they used their own version of SSH reimplemented in PHP: https://web.archive.org/web/20140102104411/http://blog.magicaltux.net/2010/06/27/php-can-do-anything-what-about-some-ssh https://web.archive.org/web/20140102104411/http://blog.magic...

Pyxl101 12y ago

True, but a system like I'm describing ought not to be terribly complicated to set up. Perhaps it's simply a remote syslog daemon under the control of a trusted exec. Preferably offsite or in a separate cage. Or if SAAS, under a distinct account. Maybe we don't block transactions on writing to the log, but whenever discrepancies are detected of more than a short time (transactions more than 60 seconds old not appearing), we page all founders and senior leaders. The trading engine stays up, but we draw much attention to the logging outage. (I'd also want controls like offline wallets and accounts that would prevent an attacker from obliterating our assets in a single withdrawal)

tyrfing 12y ago

I'd like to note that Gonzague Gay-Bouchery is an oft-ignored part of this saga. He has gone to a lot of effort to silently vanish (deleting most of his online footprint just before the announcement last February) and has been mostly ignored, but reportedly had a large role in the business side of Mtgox, while Karpeles handled the code aspects.