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Those 100,000 Lost Air Force Files Have Been Found Again (govexec.com)
The Air Force now says it will be able to recover those 100,000 investigation files dating back to 2004, after "aggressively leveraging all vendor and department capabilities." An anonymous reader quotes a report from Government Executive about the mysteriously corrupted database:
In a short, four-sentence statement released midday on Wednesday, service officials said the Air Force continues to investigate the embarrassing incident in which the files and their backups were corrupted. "Through extensive data recovery efforts over the weekend and this week, the Air Force has been able to regain access to the data in the Air Force Inspector General Automated Case Tracking System..." the statement reads. Earlier on Wednesday, the Air Force chief of staff said that the effort to recover the files involved Lockheed Martin and Oracle, the two defense contractors that run the database, plus Air Force cyber and defense cyber crime personnel.
The Chief of Staff hopes "there won't be a long-term impact, other than making sure we understand exactly what happened, how it happened and how we keep it from ever happening again." The Air Force is conducting an independent review, while Lockheed Martin is now also performing a separate internal review.
The Chief of Staff hopes "there won't be a long-term impact, other than making sure we understand exactly what happened, how it happened and how we keep it from ever happening again." The Air Force is conducting an independent review, while Lockheed Martin is now also performing a separate internal review.
So I'm not the only one who has a shoebox full of floppies and no idea at all what's on them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What a horrible scandal; they didn't actually lose the data, they just took a government contractor time frame to recover a corrupted database. I'm guessing the worst part of LockMart's inability to figure out which form to use to report the problem.
This sounds like an incident at my workplace. HR had an ancient SCO UnixWare server that we (IT) never knew about. Damn thing crashed, 2 failed hard drives on a RAID 1 array. Turns out they knew for years that one drive had failed AND there were memory errors, but they never bothered to tell us or anyone about it to fix the issues. They had a tape drive backup, but that also failed with hardware problems.
Naturally, once the server wouldn't boot, they went into full panic mode and are trying to recover the data from a failed RAID and tape backups dating back to the 1960's (don't ask me how they plan to do that, I have no idea).
Now they are "investigating the incident" and "working to prevent future failures like this in the future". It's the same at every workplace.
private industry doing it better than government:
the effort to recover the files involved Lockheed Martin and Oracle, the two defense contractors that run the database,
Wonder how much these two billed the taxpayers to clean up the mess they created?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What the hell does "leverage" mean?
I'm no longer able to pretend to know what these nonsense buzzwords mean.
but they sound so much more in control and macho (no, not really it just sounds like they had to pay some else to do the finding)
They must have asked for a copy the Chinese and Russians had stolen.
This reminds me of the Vogons. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.
Why do I have the feeling that there will be a number of situations where they say..."Sorry, while we have some of that data, there were some key parts lost."
New mantra for the Air Force "Blame it on the floppy"
If these are active AF investigations, do they have a documented chain of custody for these files if they are evidence (emails, etc.)?
Even under the UCMJ, I think that the validity of any evidence files on these servers could be questioned.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
They are lying.
Making sure that the smaller set of deliberately lost content is inaccessible to the restoration procedures. That was the whole poin tof losing them, right?
The files probably contained the missing 17 minutes form Nixon's illegal audio recordings form the Oval Office.
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
Send them to bitsavers.org!
They're doing recovery/scanning/documentation of *ALL* that stuff.
Additionally they have archive.org helping to maintain a mirror (They have pdfs of scans of electronics documents dating from ENIAC through PDP/VAX to late 90s PARISC/SPARC/x86/Alpha, including firmware and disc backups.)
Their archive is 250+Gb and growing weekly.
Couldn't they have just asked China for a copy of the files?
case we really wanted to ensure went away and made sure it is never recovered.
I have in front of me of my recently arrived DVD complete Yes Minister, and I am reminded of an exchange between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker. To paraphrase:
Sir Humphrey: There are two responses. "It is under consideration", which means we've lost it.
Hacker: And the other?
Humphrey: "It is under active consideration", which means we're looking for it.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
...plus Air Force cyber and defence cyber crime personnel
I suspect ransomware was at play... and then they just paid it.
why else bring in the cyber crime personnel... who will just say "pay the ransom"