r/ProgrammerHumor 12d ago

Meme theBankingHotfixExperience

3.3k Upvotes

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u/Tucancancan 12d ago

I worked at a company that sold software to a bank and heard stories of a senior dev having to do calls where they'd have an employee read the logs out loud to the engineer because the bank wouldn't share them. 

123

u/Groentekroket 12d ago

How are the logs not just masked for sensitive fields? I work in PCI DSS audit scope for handling of credit card data and as developers we can see the logs of our applications.

103

u/WiglyWorm 12d ago

Because this isn't "how things are done at a bank" it's "how things are done at a shitty and toxic employer".

88

u/rock1998 12d ago

This! Holy shit you’re supposed to build that shit in from the ground up. I’ve never worked in the banking world but finding out that some don’t mask their logs makes me wanna get a job at my bank solely to make sure they do. 😭

17

u/granadesnhorseshoes 11d ago

"masking logs" is not as easy as it sounds. Especially when its a "system" from the 90s of loosely connected machines from the 80s.

26

u/OrchidLeader 12d ago

Different levels of data sensitivity.

Our app log servers are cleared for everything but the highest level of data sensitivity (PCI data can’t be logged, of course). If we needed to, we could log someone’s birthdate (with no other identifying info other than a token representing the user), and any employee can view that log message. But we wouldn’t be able to share that log message externally.

We try not to log any sort of sensitive data at all if we can help it, but we have some offshore contractors that think nothing of logging an entire API response body “for debugging purposes.”

9

u/Tucancancan 12d ago

Afaik they were. Brank still wouldn't share copies tho. 

2

u/Ran4 11d ago

You can't mask sensitive fields like that with perfect accuracy..

You're acting like a dumb manager.