"Zombie Software" Blamed for Knight Capital Trading Snafu

[DataDwarf]

Wanted to share this article from IEEE on the recent uncontrolled trading on the stock market. Seems that the blame is being put on old software that was accidentally reactivated.

Begs to wonder how many servers/systems out there have old vulnerable software that has been 'disabled' that is just waiting for someone to come along and start up...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/new-insights-into-knight-capital-trading-snafu

[ajohnson]

While obviously not on this scale, I see legacy systems and applications on a significant number of the engagements I perform. The risk isn't even that they're disabled and that someone might re-enable them later on, it's that they're left online just in case some weird piece of legacy information needs to be retrieved at some point in the future. It's kind of sad, but after awhile, you just get desensitized to it.