The first salami attack?
A salami attack is when you take a very small amount of money from an awful lot of accounts. The canonical example is a bank programmer depositing sub-cent amounts of interest in a special account. These rounding errors add up.
I'm trying to find the first actual documented theft or attempted theft using this attack.
I'm hoping that a reader will know, when the first reports of salami attacks came out.
Please comment if you have an idea.
Photo: "Salami & cheese - food heaven," taken by SanFranAnnie with a Cannon SD400, which is not the camera mentioned in Mordaxus' post yesterday.
[Update, Jan 5, 2008: Steve Lipner provided me with a cite! Thomas Whiteside, Computer Capers, 1978. The copyright page states that most of the material first appeared in the New Yorker.]
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Comments
Superman III? Office Space? =)
Posted by: Anon | July 24, 2007 2:38 AM
This blog needs a "pork" category.
So far, we've had this, the bacon of the month club, and the business with expensive Spanish ham (and I may be missing a few).
Posted by: Chris | July 24, 2007 12:26 PM
There's an old attack with valuable-metal-coins, involving shaving a bit of gold off each coin with a knife. I believe this led to changes in how the outside edges of coins were made.
I think a lot of attacks on voting systems also look this way. Use a pencil lead or whatever to mess slightly with the operation of many different lever machines, so that a few votes don't get counted from each machine.
Posted by: albatross | July 24, 2007 1:16 PM
Nice one, Albatross. This is doubtless why milled coin edges were invented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_clipping).
Posted by: Chris | July 24, 2007 1:21 PM
Oh, jamón now! Is that the wurst you can do?
Posted by: shrdlu | July 24, 2007 1:47 PM
It seems that we have a ham in our midst. Best that we smoke him out before he comes back with more of his corned beef humor.
Posted by: Arthur | July 24, 2007 10:45 PM
Good luck; I spent some time a while back hunting for such a documented case without any luck...
Posted by: Nik | July 26, 2007 3:22 AM