What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business

Who, Me? Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as an "Anonymous European Developer" because he works as a DevOps engineer for a firm that creates software for governments and international institutions.

The Anonymous Developer's clients are all in the public eye, so any bugs or flaws are even less welcome than usual.

"Clients expect our software to be at the highest level of professionalism and quality," the Developer told Who, Me?

One day, a customer called to let the company know it had failed to meet that brief.

"They told us they were possibly the target of a cyberattack and requested that we take all their applications offline immediately, even ones unrelated to the symptoms."

The Anonymous Developer's company complied and set about investigating the incident, which manifested when users hovered their mouse above an interactive element on a web page, and it produced a tooltip that used very strong language to suggest users might enjoy performing a sex act.

"This application was quite a prestigious one and if users read the language, it would tarnish a public agency's image and could have easily become a matter for the press," the Anonymous Developer told Who, Me?

He also feared it could be fodder for meme makers, which could be even more humiliating – although this column fancies The Register would have been plenty humiliating if we had found this ribald tooltip on a government website.

The client assumed that the rude tooltip had been the result of an attack.

The Anonymous Developer investigated and was relieved to find no evidence of hacking or other evil actions.

But after delving through Git repositories, he found the culprit was one of his own junior developers who committed the tooltip a few years ago. Or maybe the whole dev team was to blame because nobody spotted the inappropriate text during several rounds of code reviews.

"The junior got a lecture about professionalism and the importance of not tarnishing the image of clients and the company," the Anonymous Developer told Who, Me? Then everyone else on the team got the same lecture.

"I have implemented a clever machine learning tool that scores each line of code for vulgarity and flags possible issues," he wrote. "It's now part of the static analysis toolset that all company code goes through and gets validated."

Have you been found out leaving inappropriate text in code? And what happened afterwards? Don't make another mistake by failing to click here to email your story to Who, Me? As this week's column shows, we can be trusted to tell your tale without divulging your identity. ®