In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, delivering high-quality products and services is crucial for companies to succeed. Quality assurance plays a pivotal role in ensuring that products and services meet customer requirements and expectations. In recent years, QA has become a critical component of business strategy, helping companies to improve their processes, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.
You might think that bugs go through your customers unnoticed and that they don’t really influence them, but alas, that is not true. In fact, when Tricentis studied a collection of 606 software bugs from 314 companies in 2017, they found that those 606 bugs impacted half of the world’s population and caused $1.7 trillion in losses. Sounds like a lot, right?
In our new series of Fixing Flaws, we will explore how QA has helped companies to thrive and achieve success. We will examine some success stories of companies that have leveraged QA to improve their products and services and how they have gained a competitive edge in the market.
Instagram discovers and fixes spying bug
The cybersecurity company Check Point made a discovery that sent shockwaves through the Instagram community. They found a coding vulnerability that, if left unchecked, could have granted unauthorized access to user location data, phone contacts, and cameras.
This bug was attributed to a coding error in Mozjpeg, an open-source program that Instagram uses to decode JPEG images. Whenever the program attempted to decompress an image of specific dimensions and beyond an allocated size, it would activate the bug and crash the app, leaving it wide open to attackers.
Anyone could have manipulated the bug by delivering a specially crafted image to the target’s phone via Whatsapp, E-mail, or any other online methods of media exchange. The hackers could deliver a specially crafted image to the target’s phone using various media exchange methods. This would grant them access to other elements of the phone, including cameras, microphones, and storage.
Luckily, Meta acted quickly to the discovery and released a patch that fixed the issue on all platforms. But as the dust settled, Check Point reminded developers that to reduce the attack surface, the receiver must be constrained to a small number of supported image formats.
Twitter Fixed the Bug that Exposed 5.4 Million Accounts
Not so long ago, Twitter was hit by a security vulnerability that put the data of 5.4 million accounts at risk. Hackers exploited this bug to gather information and sell it on the Dark Web. The error allowed anyone to input a known user’s phone number or email address to see if it was linked to a Twitter account, potentially exposing the identity of the user.
Twitter promptly issued a statement about the issue, stating that if someone submitted an email address or phone number to their systems, it would reveal the Twitter account associated with it, if any. The company emphasized that no passwords were exposed and encouraged users to enable two-factor authentication using authentication apps or hardware security keys to protect their accounts from unauthorized logins.
After analyzing the data for sale, Twitter confirmed that an attacker had taken advantage of the vulnerability before the company was able to patch it. As a result, Twitter will be directly informing the account owners who have been affected by this incident, and it urges all its users to remain vigilant and protect their accounts by enabling two-factor authentication.
Spotify Experienced over 2 Hours of Downtime due to a Bug in GCP
Spotify suffered a global outage on March 8th due to problems with its cloud-hosted service discovery system.
The issue was related to Spotify’s backend, which comprises several microservices that connect with each other using a variety of service discovery technologies. Users who logged out of the Spotify app were unable to log back in.
As soon as the problem was detected, Spotify rolled out configuration changes to revert affected systems back to using the DNS-based service discovery. Gradually, Spotify saw the service recover and eventually return to normal.
Spotify is working closely with Google Cloud to better understand how Traffic Director’s difficulties resulted in such a significant outage. The company has pledged to increase monitoring and alerting to ensure that similar service discovery-related issues are caught sooner in the future.
Let’s Sum Things Up
Fixing bugs is a crucial aspect of software development and maintenance, and companies adopt various strategies and tools to effectively manage the process. It is important to note that even the tech giants are not immune to bugs, hence, timely issue resolution and ensuring robust QA processes are essential to prevent any adverse impact on your business.
If you’re searching for a dependable QA services provider, look no further than QATestLab! Our proficient specialists can assist you in establishing and sustaining your QA process, safeguarding your business against any potential bugs.
Tell us about your product, and we will tailor a customized QA solution to meet your unique needs.
