The Necklace Of Death.

[ralerin]

Not sure what forum to put this under, so I'm putting it here in General Work Chat. Move as necessary.

So there's a line from my register to Timbuktu as usual at my Aid of Rite. A customer goes up to coworker N's register with a necklace and a few other things. The barcode on the necklace causes an error message on the scanner which makes "Panes", the OS running on our registers, panic and reboot, a process that takes about 5-7 minutes per register but might as well be an eternity because there's a giant line. So N's register is KO'd, she goes to another one and KO's it, then comes to mine, tries the necklace out on it first before she rings anything, and then KO's my register. Not her fault, just the barcode, but it means I need to skip the hundreds of people down to the next register over with a groan.

I wasn't happy but in the end it was rather funny and we joke about it afterward when the line goes away!

Edit: Well, today I found out the new Christmas slippers we have do the same thing. Hm. How odd.

[Pimento]

I mean...i hate to say it...

But if it KO'd every other register...why try it on one with a huge line lol.

[Seraph]

I actually remember my manager at a store I used to work at telling me about something like this once. There was a big issue once where some people found out that the registers could be controlled through certain UPCs. Like, literally in case something happened, you could scan one of a few UPCs that they taped above the keyboard, and it'd perform certain tasks. Some fairly clever people then got fake UPCs made up that would instantly shut down the registers! I believe he said they only pulled it on a few stores as a "joke" before Home Office changed the software.

[roothorick]

The barcode on the necklace causes an error message on the scanner which makes "Panes", the OS running on our registers, panic and reboot, a process that takes about 5-7 minutes per register but might as well be an eternity because there's a giant line.

A BARCODE can do that? How much you wanna bet it's an exploitable buffer overflow? Pwn an entire POS network with a frickin' barcode... that's a new low.