That Man Who 'Deleted His Entire Company' With a Line of Code? It Was a Hoax (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As many Slashdot readers speculated, the story about a man deleting his entire company with a line of code was a hoax. Marco Marsala, the owner of a Web hosting company claimed on a forum earlier this week that he deleted all the data on his company's server. Stack Overflow, which runs the forum, says that the post was a hoax, and pointed to an article on an Italian news outlet, which describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company. "It was just a joke," Marsala told the paper.

Comments

Interesting tactic

[Crashmarik]

"Give us your data we'll delete it"

I suppose they really really believe, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Re:Interesting tactic

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose they really really believe, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Well, if it works for Donald Trump...

Re:Interesting tactic

[MightyMartian]

He's Italian. It would be more like "That's some nice data you got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

Re:Interesting tactic

[physicsphairy]

Previously, on slashdot:

The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.

I mean, there's also a reason he is revealing it was a hoax. The 'it was a hoax' articles will do damage control while also doubling his exposure. I presume they'll come up first in searches, being newer. Would this be a as great as getting your name out there in a positive light in the first place? No. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and it's expensive. This was effective and free. Not everyone will appreciate the joke and some potential customers will be lost. But the potential customers when no one knows about you is zero. I'd say wait and see how the company is doing in a couple of years before denying it was a good play.

Idiot

[nukenerd]

describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company

He tries to get more business by saying he deleted all his customers' data ? What an idiot. And anyone who remains his customer after this is an even bigger idiot.

Re:Idiot

[Frosty Piss]

And anyone who remains his customer after this is an even bigger idiot.

Perhaps he can become a government contractor...

Re:Idiot

[khasim]

Plz help!

I've accidentally routed all the toilets at work into the hamburger machine. I will be in trouble if anyone finds out how much poop is in the hamburgers.

Ha ha! It was just my marketing idea. Plz buy my hamburgers.

Why is no one buying my hamburgers?

Re:Idiot

[Bearhouse]

Why was this modded "funny"; it's insightful!

Good Grief...

[Frosty Piss]

describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" to promote Marsala's company

How does telling everyone that you are incompetent "promote" your business?

Backups are a hoax

[Iamthecheese]

The way most companies do backups there's no point. If backups are a checkmark on the official risk management schedule, you're fucked when you need one. I've seen it. To PROPERLY manage backups means you need to dedicate extra man-hours to making sure they can be restored in a wide variety of circumstances. By actually restoring from backup on occasion. Can you restore after you lose a server and the backup software on it? Can you restore after you've had a virus undetected for a week? For a month? Are your incremental backups too unwieldy to work in real life? Does it actually take a full day to pull the reels and get the data back? Do you have offline copies? How sure are you that your encryption can be decrypted?

Doing backups properly is hard. The story would have had a ring of truth if it included backups that couldn't be restored because the encryption key was the wrong version.

Re:Backups are a hoax

[Princeofcups]

I like to say "backups are easy, disaster recovery is hard." Old school, tapes go offsite weekly. Contemporary, all backups are synced to the "cloud." There is no true backups solution that leaves everything available to the running systems, remote mounting or not. From what I can tell, he was really talking about disaster recovery replication, which isn't what I would call backups anyway.

Re:Backups are a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Former backup/recovery sysadmin here.

There are two things a company needs to define before they should start looking at solutions: the RPO (Recovery Point Objective), and the RTO (Recovery Time Objective). Recovery Point Objective basically means, "How much data can you afford to lose in the event of a disaster? A second or less? An hour? A week? A month?" Recovery Time Objective basically means, "How long do you have to get that data back onto an operational system? How long can you afford for your system to be down?"

Those two figures then let you say, "Okay - so what do we need to do to meet those objectives?"

Traditional backup-to-tape-and-ship-the-tapes-offsite methods generally give you a recovery point of up to twenty four hours back (depending on how you do it). The recovery time is usually measured in days. Which is fine as a last resort, but may not be adequate from a general point of view.

Conversely, if you take disk snapshots, and synchronise them to some site elsewhere that's running warm, you have a very low RPO and RTO. But malicious damage in this case is harder to defend against.

Generally speaking, I advocate using both methods for hypercritical systems. The snapshot/synchronise system gives you the low RPO and RTO; the tape backups give you a modicum of protection against malicious damage.

How much should you spend on the system? Now there's the million dollar question, and again, it comes down to the business tradeoffs.

I've had companies ask me if I can recover their data in the event of a disaster. My usual response is, "probably." They generally don't like that answer, and ask me why I'm not certain. "Have you run a recovery test to verify that everything works as expected? No? Then you don't know, and you don't have reliable backups." Sure, if you run a recovery test, you only know that that data is recoverable, but it does give you a modicum of certainty that other backups using the same methods will be recoverable. And if you run a recovery test and it fails, well... fix the problems that caused it to fail, and try again until it works.

It astounds me that companies will spend a fortune on backup systems, and then not bother running recovery tests because it's too hard. Tell that to the regulators when your financial system is toast, and can't be restored from backups...

Re:Stupid is as stupid does

[sumdumass]

Your right. Bad publicity can be good "free publicity" in some cases but this guy basically said "look at me, I'm a moron". You can recover from accidents and other misfortunes but pretending to be an idiot is sort of a lot more difficult.

Re:Dangerous deletion

[allo]

Start a VM and try it. It will do exactly nothing without --no-preserve-root.

On the other hand "rm -rf /*" will do.

The PCWorld author, however, is naive

[vlb]

The PCWorld post contains this sentence:
"The most surprising thing might be that so many people believed him, including those on a forum for technology experts."

Yes, we believed it, because it's all too plausible. We've been there. We've done that. We've cleaned up the mess.

Or maybe it wasn't a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

He got lucky, fixed it, and acted like it was a joke. Remember don't suspect !malice when it could be stupidity...