A man accidentally deleted his company by running a destructive line of code on his servers.
It’s a hoax! The viral story of a man who deleted his company
with basically one stroke of a key when he ran a bad line of code, is
nothing but a hoax. This turned out to be a marketing ploy that took off
in leaps and bounds when Marco Marsala first asked for help on Server
Fruit community forums.
Experts jumped on the forum to deliver Marsala the bad news
after he explained that he had accidentally ran a “Bash script.”
According to Digital Trends
on April 17 Marsala wrote: "Last night I accidentally ran, on all
servers, a Bash script. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups
too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same
script (that is a backup maintenance script)."
Marco also claimed to run a small Web hosting company with
1,535 clients and he reported all the client files are gone. It sounded
like a real mess even to the folks who have no idea about computer codes
and risk of deletion.
Most experts are familiar with this code and they jumped on
the community forums to give Marsala the bad news. The responses he got
shows just how dire the experts believed his situation to be after he
explained his mistake.
One person wrote; "I feel sorry to say that your company is
now essentially dead." This was an expert offering the bad news. They
continued, "You might have an extremely slim chance to recover from this
is if you turn off everything right now and hand your disks over to a
reputable data recovery company." At least this person offered a chance,
however dim.
Another person painted a picture of his new life for him with these
words; "You're going out of business. You don't need technical advice;
you need to call your lawyer."
Digital Trends offers an explanation of what Marsala claimed
to have done: They write that he entered "“rm -rf,” which effectively
tells a computer to delete
just about everything. “Rm” is the remove command, “r” specifies
everything within a directory, and “f” forces the command to push past
the normal blockers that would prevent such a disaster from occurring."
According to Design and Trend,
the news picked up these forum posts and ran with it. On Friday, Stack
Overflow, the organization behind the forum where Marsala originally
posted this ploy, told its members they had " been played."
The desperate guy who deleted his entire business was
actually just a "hoax in some kind of viral marketing effort.” It was
reported that an Italian newspaper figured out the hoax and Marsala
admitted it was a joke to the publication. Stack Overflow said in a
statement, “The moderators on Server Fault have been in contact with the
author about this, and as you can imagine, they’re not particularly
amused by it."
While Marco created this scenario as a hoax, it is based in
reality. Design and Trend writes "Scripts or macros, which are a set of
directions for a computer, are increasingly utilized by businesses to
complete repetitive tasks and save time. Automation tools are now the
norm for data transfer, maintenance and a host of other applications. A
wrong command in these scripts could easily result in serious error."
This explains why the experts fell so easily for this hoax because it
has happened before and it can easily happen again, according to the
video above explaining the viral story as it broke last week.
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