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Comment by gw99 | Hacker News Reader

This stuff happens all the time.

A few years back a company I was contracting for had one of their end users report a high severity security defect. Apparently he signed into the app and thought he had been hacked because a couple of large 6-figure transactions had been made.

After several hours of inconclusive investigation where even identifying the user proved difficult, this turned out to be him seeing the marketing example screens in the app store and having a panic. The app never even got installed and he never signed up for it.

The marketing screens were quickly updated to show something less impressive and with a sample data only warning...

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> The app never even got installed and he never signed up for it.

....that is some serious "My computer won't turn on. No I can't check to see if the power cord is plugged in, its too dark to see back there because the power is out." energy.

I’m quite curious to be a fly on the wall where the decision was made to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Why wouldn’t he just be dismissed rather than wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars of employee time?

By chance could you illuminate the thought process?

I’m guessing they figured that the lowest common denominator was rather close to the “median” common denominator.

When you are in a regulated industry it’s better to be sure than incur the wrath of the regulator.

Ah! That’s a good point.

I wonder how big of a company you'd have to be to go through all the effort of changing marketing screens because of that. I can think of the biggest company I've worked for laugh at that and move on.

Was it Personal Capital? I always thought it was silly that the demo screenshots in the marketing were some absurd amount in the multi millions. Like, who do you think you are marketing to?

Might be useful internally though. Back when I had a pet dinosaur I worked on an accounting program. Most test data was moving around 4 digit numbers. I made myself a richer test company and uncovered a few numeric bugs this way :)

No wasn’t them. Similar concept though.

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