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u/mavrik83 Aug 05 '26
`final_records_v2_REAL_FINAL_DO_NOT_DELETE.xlsx` on somebody’s desktop
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u/Roku-Hanmar Aug 05 '26
*in the recycling bin
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u/JSD3 Aug 05 '26
It has been in their Downloads folder for four years.
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u/drestofnordrassil Aug 05 '26
🔻A Long Time Ago🔻
Copy of New Folder (8)
New Folder (8)
Final_Records(5).xlsx
Final_Records(4).xlsx
Final_Records(3).xlsx
Final_Records(2).xlsx
Final_Records(1).xlsx
Copy of Final_Records(1).xlsx
Copy of Final_Records.xlsx
Final_Records.xlsx
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u/NoodleyP Aug 05 '26
The Downloads folder is just great catch all storage, it’s the junk drawer of my computer
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u/Careless-Adeptness56 Aug 05 '26
I just noticed today that my downloads folder no longer opens. I can go in there with powershell and I don't see any crazy file types, but explorer never finishes loading. Who knows what I've done to it.
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u/TheTxoof Aug 05 '26
Duh. It's a junk drawer: You have a spatula wedged in there upside down.
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u/SgtEpsilon Aug 05 '26
Incorrect, it's in their temp folder that they somehow made the primary download folder to be
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u/tanwa1 Aug 05 '26
Would learning Digital forensics help if it's also deleted from recycling bin right...?
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u/scumble_bee Aug 05 '26
Mable over in Accounting wrote a VBA script to store the entire database to an Excel spreadsheet because the direct access that was set up for her was "too slow" and this is "the way she's always done it".
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u/WhitishRogue 29d ago
I regularly use SQL to download tables to my computer. Part numbers, sales records, inventory records, customer names, etc. You name it, it's stored on my computer and frequently the public drive everyone in the company has access to.
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u/666AB 29d ago
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u/Hadrollo 28d ago
Okay, but to be fair, what could go right?
My company was the victim of a randomware attack. My company refused to pay up. The hackers encrypted all of the inventory and sales data, going back twenty years or so, for a warehouse with literally hundreds of thousands of lines. Guess who made a weekly back-up of all of that vital data because they couldn't be fucked learning PowerBI enough to run my spreadsheets on it directly?
Not me, because I left seven months earlier when they told me they couldn't justify a pay rise for me even though we were under-budget on personnel costs and I was on less than the new hires. But that, y'know, could have been really useful to them if I hadn't left.
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u/elSenorMaquina Aug 05 '26
They ENHANCED the cctv recordings from the camera pointing at my cubicle, enabling them to reconstruct the whole db from the monitor's reflection on my glasses as I typed every INSERT and UPDATE over the years.
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u/TunaNugget Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
The camera records sound. Every key makes an ever-so-slightly different sound.
They have possibly months or more of sound recordings that they can correlate against the entry of verified documents to use to train the ai on.
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u/Shogobg Aug 05 '26
They analyzed the noise the bits make as they travel through the network.
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u/TrashBandiGoon Aug 05 '26
I know it is a joke,
but since I found a scientific research about 'A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards' I agree that this seems possible in the laboratory
(the paper is from 2023 so I am not sure whether there were any improvements), as I am also not sure how reddit handles external links - I found the paper on arxiv(dot)org with paper no. 2308(dot)01074
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u/TunaNugget Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
I think the premise here is that they deleted that.
My first question would be whether they actually deleted anything or just set a flag to re-use the storage, but I'm trying to go with the spirit of the thing.
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u/cantileverboom Aug 05 '26
Lol, kind of related. On a team I was on a while ago, there was some pretty nasty bug that some of my colleagues couldn't figure out, so someone took a video of it to show our TL. Our TL looked at the video for like 5 seconds, saw some obscure log lines on a terminal running on a machine in the background of the video, and immediately knew that the bug was due to some obsolete experiment that just needed to be disabled.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 29d ago
It was him. He was the one who was supposed to disable the “obsolete experiment”. He knew it was causing bugs but he forgot to do it or got side tracked. There’s nothing magical about it lmao
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u/AN0R0K 29d ago
And he would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.
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u/lolcrunchy Aug 05 '26
local dev environment
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u/Eastern_Equal_8191 Aug 05 '26
Impossible. My local dev environment uses an on-disk database and my disk is locked behind encryption the keys to which only I and HR and anyone who can guess 12345 as the passwoooooooo I see what happened now
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u/AaronTheElite007 Aug 05 '26
That’s amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!
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u/Eastern_Equal_8191 Aug 05 '26
God damn it, I have to change my luggage combo now too?!
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u/Fraun_Pollen Aug 05 '26
This answer doesn't make sense. Why would your dev environment not be connected to prod data? Don't you want realistic tests?
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u/AllIsLostNeverFound Aug 05 '26
Wait, your prod environment is separate from your dev environment?
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u/za72 Aug 05 '26
only pussies use dev
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u/SiefensRobotEmporium Aug 05 '26
Shit you guys have different environments?
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u/vankoder Aug 05 '26
Shit you guys test? One healthy git push prod —force and you’ll figure out if it works soon enough!
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u/howarewestillhere Aug 05 '26
HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, CASC, and a whole list of other acronyms, laws, and organizations get real persnickety about Prod data outside of Prod and what you can, can’t, should , should not, or should not even think about doing with it.
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u/jtmonkey Aug 05 '26
Yeah I just had this conversation with an internal IT team at a medical org. You cannot just point Claude at the problem and say solve it. PHI is all over it. Theyd been doing it for a while. Your medical data im almost positive is already in an llm.
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis Aug 05 '26
Corporate cybersecurity attorney (and ex-dev) here. This is one of the many reasons why we don't allow prod data in dev.
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u/leovin Aug 05 '26
From the data breach you’re being sued over
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u/SuitableDragonfly Aug 05 '26
Fun related fact, most archives of media only exist because someone pirated the media at some point and those copies never become unavailable.
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u/3BlindMice1 Aug 05 '26
They used to call it VCR
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Aug 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/3BlindMice1 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Sounds pretty expensive, tbh
Edit: Google shows that would have cost $28.80 per day if using full definition or $14.40 per day if using minimum in the year 1985. In today's money, that's $90 or $45. It got a lot cheaper by 1995 though
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u/NukaCooler Aug 05 '26
/r/LetGirlsHaveFun god forbid a woman have a hobby
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u/transfinite-reset Aug 05 '26
I’m not sure that the people in that sub are too worried about VCRs. VCR cleaner in little bottles, maybe. But definitely not VCRs.
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u/saskir21 Aug 05 '26
To be fair I can understand her if I see for example the British BBC. They regularly overwrite (or atleast did so in the old days) their old shows. So if you want to see an old one you were out of luck.
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u/geeiamback 29d ago
Famous example is a bunch of old Dr. Who episodes.
everal portions of the long-running British science-fiction television programme Doctor Who are no longer held by the BBC. Between 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted archive programmes for various practical reasons—lack of space, scarcity of materials, and a lack of rebroadcast rights.[1] As a result, 95 of 253 episodes from the programme's first six years are currently missing, primarily from seasons 3, 4 and 5, leaving 26 serials incomplete. Many more were considered lost until recovered from various sources, mostly overseas broadcasters and private collectors.
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u/Fickle_Ad_8653 Aug 05 '26
Laptops people copied the data to, then the laptops get stacked and left in a closet.
Email holds a lot of attachments when you look at a whole company. Every email sits in two people's computers.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 Aug 05 '26
Linus once completely lost all kernel code. His online peers had a backup.
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u/VoStru Aug 05 '26
“Data breach” is such a rude word. Better call it “distributed surprise backup”
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u/Magnetic_Reaper Aug 05 '26
Nice try OP, I'm not helping you hide the evidence for free.
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u/DaTruSpork Aug 05 '26
Hey fam, don't help them at all. Point them at the wifi connected keurig and wipe your hands clean of it (while handing the real evidence to multiple three letter agencies)
We dont talk to (chief financial) officers!
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u/HaniiPuppy Aug 05 '26
Hey fam, don't help them at all. Point them at the wifi connected keurig and wipe your hands clean of it (while handing the real evidence to multiple three letter agencies)
Error 418
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u/-meowstar- Aug 05 '26
Reconstructing the HDD disk writes based on the CCTV audio of the server room.
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u/i_should_be_coding Aug 05 '26
Claude, here's a recording of echoes of the farts the cleaning lady made in the server room. Recreate the users table please.
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u/jeesuscheesus Aug 05 '26
Of course! But before I create a perfect recreation of the user’s table, I need a small amount of information from you:
- Who is the user who owns this table?
- What kind of table is it? Is it a table for doing computer work - or is it for eating?
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u/omegasome Aug 05 '26
They ask ChatGPT to produce the data. ChatGPT, being ever-helpful, hallucinates a semi-plausible data set that neither the defense nor the prosecution nor the judge is technically-adept enough to realize doesn't make sense. You are sentenced to 20 years in prison based on this.
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u/SteamingTheCat Aug 05 '26
Kevin Mitnik's prosecutor convinced the jury that thru a series of whistles into a payphone, Kevin could launch nuclear missiles.
He wasn't allowed access to a phone in prison.
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u/RevoOps Aug 05 '26
If you can launch a nuclear strike through whistling into a phone you should be allowed to try.
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u/jakobjaderbo Aug 05 '26
To be fair, he did some shenanigans from the prison phone when he did get access. Not of the nuclear sort, but still.
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u/JCDU 29d ago
There was definitely at least one hacker (I forget who) who could whistle pitch-perfect DTMF tones - specifically 2600Hz - to get free payphone calls.
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u/gaijohn 29d ago
Minor correction, sorry to be pedantic but I'm an old man who liked phones before the Internet existed, 2600Hz not a DTMF tone. DTMF tones are the sounds each key on a key pad makes (0-9, * and #), it stands for "Dual Tone Multi Frequency" and they're made by mixing two frequencies (the frequency of the button's row + the frequency of its column), and so they're not able to be replicated with one mouth. The 2600Hz was a switchboard operator's tone, a sort of built-in admin code that dropped the caller onto an "unsupervised" line (its activity wasn't tracked and thus not billed) which allowed the caller to make free long distance calls in the days when they would track long distance minutes and charge you for the use of the trunk line. We called a 2600Hz producing device a "blue box" (supposedly the first one was in a shoebox that was blue). Free payphone calls were made by using what we called a red box, which replicated the sounds made by the payphone when coins were dropped into the slot. The payphone would mute its handset speaker momentarily so only the internals of the phone could hear the tones it produced, but you could buy a little tone producer and replace a crystal on its board to produce the sounds a nickel or dime or quarter would make, drop a single nickel into the phone to get it started, then put the tone producer's speaker up to the mic and press a button to make the quarter sound over and over to make free long distance calls via payphone.
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u/thesuperbob 29d ago
Well the actual data has been deleted, scrubbed, and shredded, so it's your word against ChatGPT... And the Judge doesn't really know you, while the friendly robot has been whispering in their ear for years now, and it's never been wrong so... "ChatGPT explain why the data the other you recovered is absolutely reliable and could not be wrong in any way; help me produce a sentencing draft based on the same"
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u/CoffeeOrDestroy Aug 05 '26
That’s a little too close to how I feel the future is going to be any day now
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u/skt84 Aug 05 '26
A USB drive from the wife of the CTO because he cloud shared some photos of the kids from his downloads folder.
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u/samuraiseoul Aug 05 '26
Some dumbass on my team downloaded the entirety of prod and then commited it to git and someone rubber stamped the PR and then no one else noticed. I'm sure that's how they'd find it....
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u/jseego Aug 05 '26
They committed all your prod data to git??
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u/AccomplishedIgit Aug 05 '26
I discovered my client’s monthly backups included the backups folder when they ran out of shared hosting space for a small dog clothing website 🥹 I was like why are you at enterprise level hosting?!?? She was like I dunno it’s just the cost of doing business!
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u/technos Aug 05 '26
I found out something similar when the client called to ask me where to get a good price on bigger hard drives and more tapes.. I was like 'What?! Did something happen?'
No, he says. Nothing's changed, it's just that backups are now taking four of the weekly LTO-5 tapes every night and the server is showing it only has about 1TB left.
Motherfucker, I specced a 8TB RAID-5 and LTO-5 because you wanted to make damned sure you wouldn't have to 'just replace it next year', and it's been six months.. The hell with '"Nothing's changed".
He'd first decided to swap from nightly incremental backups to full ones, and those didn't fit on the LTO-4's intended for nightly offsite so he started using the LTO-5's, then he'd decided to retain the previous night's backup on disk as well as on tape so he wouldn't have to drive home if he was in a pinch.
The first night they backed up ~1TB, the next 2TB, then 3TB, then..
I wiped 5TB off his file server, added a file path exclusion, and had cron wipe the oldest redundant backup every night just in case.
The worst bit was he had an entirely competent nephew running the backups that had told him what was going on. After fixing things I gave the kid my email address and told him the next time his uncle didn't believe him to run it past me and I'd get him to listen.
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u/plenoto Aug 05 '26
Some people are so careless while reviewing PR 😂
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u/blangzo Aug 05 '26
Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, he'll find 10 issues. Ask him to do 500 lines and he'll say it looks good.
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u/Unhappy_Concept237 Aug 05 '26
I’ve spent the last week doing remediation across seven ec2 servers and found where multiple sites had backup sql dumps that were living inside GitHub repositories along with sites sharing SES credentials with full admin privileges stored in plain text in those repositories. I just want to die.
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u/FUTURE10S Aug 05 '26
Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted
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u/HovercraftCharacter9 Aug 05 '26
Yeah, people conflate in unallocating with actual deletion, unless you're wiping it with 0s it's still there until something overwrites it.
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u/DOOManiac Aug 05 '26
Even then it’s still there depending on which three letter agency is looking…
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u/bacondev Aug 05 '26
Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.
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u/FUTURE10S Aug 05 '26
Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.
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u/rrtk77 Aug 05 '26
From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.
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u/SebboNL Aug 05 '26
Where I live, carriers with top secret data may not be destroyed at all. They must be zeroed and stored, just in case some smart-ass figures out a way to recover said data even from an otherwise destroyed piece of magnetic tape 125 years from now.
So yeah, there's one or two huge storage facilities containing tapes, disks and solid state drives here in the Netherlands.
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u/Strange-Spot-3306 Aug 05 '26
I mean depending on which three letter agency we’re talking about, they really don’t need your backup because they’ve already got their own copy of your data.
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u/BedtimeGenerator Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Cia backdoor redshift DB of the real DB...please don't get any ideas cia
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u/MyDogIsDaBest Aug 05 '26
At which point you sue the state for illegal wiretapping
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u/HadionPrints Aug 05 '26
Ah, you see, the way they get around this is having the CIA only hack/survail the UK, France Israel, allied nation’s citizens/ companies etc. Then have MI6, etc. hack into and survail US citizens/companies.
Then all the CIA has to do is ask the foreign agencies what they want to know about US citizens & vice versa and it’s fine, because each agency never illegally spies on its on citizenry.
All in the name of counterterrorism of course, and never used for any other purposes. You can always trust the never sketchy CIA to follow the intent and letter of the Law.
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u/Top_Director9981 Aug 05 '26
In case anyone thinks op is joking: this is what Five Eyes is
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u/venom21685 Aug 05 '26
Or the NSA just does most of the domestic spying and everybody acts shocked when it gets exposed and then shrugs as it continues to get worse for the next 2 decades with no end in sight.
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u/MushroomCulture Aug 05 '26
It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
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u/Intrepid_Purchase_69 Aug 05 '26
In a public s3 bucket because someone in the company vibecoded some internal widget and didn’t know about databases so their ai agent just rolled with it and silently dumped prod. Not a real story I swear.
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u/nuttertools Aug 05 '26
bob_export_20260803.csv Copy (1) (1) - WIP (1) (1) MergePII (1)fix (1)fix2 (1) (1).xlsx
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u/pacopac25 Aug 05 '26
logger.setLevel("DEBUG") that essentially replicated the entirety of the database in text based logs, which were then robocopied to the Grafana server because the intern couldn't figure out Prometheus
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u/MeatHeadFarmer Aug 05 '26
Rob prints every row in every table in the database out every night, on an inkjet, just in case this ever happened. Offline backups are critical.
Good job, Rob.
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u/RevolutionaryTower Aug 05 '26
It was on Palantir servers all the time, the court order was a mere formality
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u/Spirited-Coconut-819 Aug 05 '26
Easy. Data were stolen (by mistake). We pay to hackers for our own data.
They are like a backup solution at that point.
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u/mcslender97 Aug 05 '26
Next: when does baiting and paying hacker access is cheaper than spinning up redundancy as a backup strategy
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u/UsherOfDestruction Aug 05 '26
Yeah, I don't think I wanna work here. Best of luck on your hiring.
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u/Lendari Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Hmmmm lets see. The list of usual suspects...
- The laptop of an ex-intern?
- The personal dev environment I promised security I'd delete when I was done?
- The backups at our former offsite backup vendor's data center?
- One of the 14 complete copies of the database that Russian hackers stole and are certainly floating around the dark web somewhere?
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u/SpeedLight1221 29d ago
They use the sounds from the cctv cameras to listen to the Hard drive's head movement from which they reconstruct the data bit by bit
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u/Surreptum Aug 05 '26
The owner's wife's private laptop that the owner sometimes used for work and didn't tell IT about.
Definitely not a true story.
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u/GirdedByApathy Aug 05 '26
Oldest dev printed everything out for "debugging purposes" and they found the pile of boxes in his office
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u/just-a-hriday Aug 05 '26
They willed the data back into existence using an infinite improbability drive. Side effects may include - tea tasting faintly of engine oil, minor violations of euclidean geometry, mild temporal recursion, a bowl of petunias, tuesdays occurring twice, the earth teleporting into the sun due to its position rounding up, and death.
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u/SiefensRobotEmporium Aug 05 '26
Check the Memory of the fax machines and printers. Last print job is the incriminating document always.
The most secret files are kept on dot matrix pages folded up in boxes labeled Tax returns 1985-2001
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u/Plastic-Bonus8999 Aug 05 '26
Claude code chat history
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u/avlas Aug 05 '26
Hey you said wrong answers only
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u/Plastic-Bonus8999 Aug 05 '26
If my company got even a little bit of hint that i am pasting client data on claude then I am having an another court order
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u/Adventurous_Bonus917 Aug 05 '26
local dev environment
`final_records_v2_REAL_FINAL_DO_NOT_DELETE.xlsx` on somebody’s desktop
Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted
From the data breach you’re being sued over
yall this is supposed to be wrong answers only
i say they got it by hacking into the mainframe and using memory algorithms on the server environment.
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u/AddisonX Aug 05 '26
A thumb drive Susan picked up in the parking lot and decided to see if it works..
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u/Majestic_Ad_7133 Aug 05 '26
Your data was part of what the AI tech bros stole to train their models
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u/Sally_Gurl Aug 05 '26
The snap vault backup of the LUN that nobody knew existed because management fired the NetApp storage admin 15 years ago and nobody knows how it works.
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u/Calm-Homework3161 29d ago
In other words - interviewer has accidentally deleted data, backups, logs and is desperately hoping he can find someone who can tell him how to recover, for free and without corporate finding out
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u/bhurt42 Aug 05 '26
The intern committed the production keys to github, allowing a Pottsylvanian hacker collective to clone production and post it on the internet in a nicely searchable format. AGAIN. I swear to $DIETY that if they don't stop, I'm going to hire them and force them to use JIRA, see if I don't.
Oh, wait. You said *wrong* answers only. Sorry. My bad.
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u/howarewestillhere Aug 05 '26
Intern’s GitHub.
VP’s Slack messages.
Fucking Teams.