[TUHS] salami slicing, was Buffer overflow found/fixed in v4 tape ; )

[John Levine via TUHS]

It appears that Paul Winalski via TUHS <paul.winalski at gmail.com> said:
>The audit department at one of Hartford's major insurance companies
>received a phone call.  It was from the head of the local BMW dealership.
>He told them, "One of your IT workers just paid cash for a top-of-the-line
>BMW.  We thought you'd like to know that."  It turns out that the IT worker
>was the programmer responsible for maintaining the program that prints the
>paychecks.  The weekly pay calculation often yielded amounts in fractions
>of pennies.  These were either rounded up or down to the nearest cent.  The
>fractional pennies were tracked in an account called the breakage account.
>This programmer had created a fake employee in the company's computer
>records and had a check printed for that "person" containing the amount of
>money in the breakage account.  He had been doing this for some time and
>had embezzled enough money to pay cash for a top-end Beemer.

It's a swell story, but it's an urban legend told in many different varieties.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-salami-technique/

R's,
John