Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/disgruntled-employee-kills-journalspace-with-data-wipe-2009015/

by thomas • 18 years ago

20 22 18 years ago

geek.com

ktharavaad• 18 years ago

and here is the link to the guys who fked them over:

http://www.lagomorphics.com/

Its funny that they listed Journalspace under their "notable clients" section.

acangiano3• 18 years ago

If true, the disgruntled employee belongs in jail.

bprater• 18 years ago

What I can't fathom is whether this person realized that there were any legal ramifications to doing a data wipe?

Did he think they'd just ignore the fact that he just killed their business?

acangiano3• 18 years ago

Criminals often have poor impulse control, and let their emotions govern their actions without worrying very much about the consequences of their actions. This is particularly accentuated in those criminals who are also affected by psychopathy, for which the consequences of their actions towards other people are irrelevant.

jrp• 18 years ago

I don't understand -- they seem to have been hosted by someone else; did the hosts not do backups or did the employee somehow delete those too?

Seems like at least two things went wrong.

gcheong2• 18 years ago

It looks like automated backups is an add-on service, not part of their base hosting package.

dcminter• 18 years ago

As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their off-site SAN. I was not amused.

First rule of backups: trust nobody!

fnazeeri• 18 years ago

Remember that scene in The Matrix where Cypher kills Switch and Apoc by unplugging them. "Not like this."

Wow. What a way to go.

cdr• 18 years ago

If you read the original post, the supposed "disgruntled employee" worked for lagomorphics, not JournalSpace, and there's no evidence said employee was involved in the data loss, just conjecture by JournalSpace.

Flagged for being incorrect and not adding anything.

timf• 18 years ago

The original journalspace announcement was discussed here, btw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762

Tichy• 18 years ago

Interesting problem: how can you get to having backups if the person whose responsibility it would have been to take care of backups is the one who screws you over.

I guess this calls for technical CEOs...

wmf• 18 years ago

The two-man rule?

First one who snitches on his coworker gets a bonus?

jws• 18 years ago

There don't seem to be new facts in this article, but it discards the "catastrophic OS flaw" theory and selects the "disgruntled employee" theory though it appears to conflate it with a historical disgruntled employee. It seems this is possibly shoddy reporting rather than new information.

Back at journalspace, I notice that if you buy their domain names they will throw in 6 months of free hosting on the same machines that destroyed their business. How generous.

weegee• 18 years ago

having no tape backup is a crime

jhancock• 18 years ago

I just started using tarsnap. Love it!!! It just works. The default behavior is exactly what I need.

sireat• 18 years ago

I thought tape backup had died out (good riddance 40MB QIC tapes).

This article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=267 from 2 years ago calculated that tape becomes practical when you have more than 10TB to backup, I imagine it is even worse now, that is you need to backup even more data before tape becomes the economy option.

Maybe there is some recent advance in tape technology?

grouchyOldGuy2• 18 years ago

Tape is a long way from being dead. We have tape libraries directly attached to our SAN and they backup 160 GB per tape. Because of data retention laws (we are a government agency) we need to archive backups for years, which we do off-site in a data vault. For SOHO use though, disk-to-disk backups generally are cheaper and faster, but it's still important to store backups off-site.

whatusername• 18 years ago

LTO4 holds 1.6TB (or 800GB if the data is already pre-compressed - ie JPG's or MP3's). Write speed of a theoritical 120Mb/sec (about the speed of gigabit ethernet). So unless you're running 10gigE these days - if you try and backup a server to tape through a network connection - the tape speed's probably not the bottleneck.

So slightly better than the QIC tapes.

I don't think anything compares cost wise (per TB) to a fitted out SL8500 / TS3500 or similar with LTO4..

Also - 10TB isn't that huge these days in terms of a backup environment..

All that being said - For anything under about 2TB/night I would be still be looking at getting away with just using disk (and replicating the backups to offsite).

Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe

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