Secure by Design

2 Intermission: The anti-Hamlet

This chapter covers

• The hazards of too-shallow modeling
• What deep modeling feels like
• Security flaws in the form of broken business integrity
• Deep modeling to mitigate risk

This is a real story about how negative numbers can cause severe economic loss. It’s based on a case we worked on with a client, but to be able to share the details, we’ve obfuscated the context. Most importantly, we’ve changed what the business sold. We can assure you that it wasn’t books. Interestingly enough, there are other examples that actually did involve books. Amazon had a similar bug around the year 2000.¹  But for those cases, we don’t know the under-the-hood details.

¹ Described, for example, in Gojko Adzic’s book Humans vs Computers ...