How would you feel if the hosting company you have entrusted with the security of your website deleted all your files?
Mr. Marco Marsala is the owner of a small hosting company, or to put it better, was the owner of a small hosting company, which, unfortunately, will close after an irreparable mistake.
Two days ago, Mr. Marsala had discovered a bug in his code, but after the damage had already been done.
As he reports on the technical support forum, he managed to delete the contents of the company's servers, along with the backup network files, which should have been separated from the live site hosting infrastructure.
The error stemmed from poor design in the code of Ansible, a Linux utility used to run automated scripts at certain intervals on multiple servers simultaneously.
Mr Marsala revealed that one of the scripts he used was the very dangerous bash command “rm -rf”, which tells a server to delete all data, ignoring errors and without asking for any kind of confirmation from the user.
As he explained, the syntax he used was:
"rm -rf {foo}/{bar}",where foo and bar were two variables that were dynamically defined and passed through the script.
Due to an error in variable processing, the general syntax failed to insert their values into the bash command.
So the command then became “rm -rf /”, which means “delete everything without asking anything” on the “/” drive, which is the root of the computer, i.e. all disk drives.
Thus, Mr. Marsala and his 1,535 customers were left without data, since the backup copies were also deleted after the destructive command was also run on the backup storage servers.
Meanwhile, in the support forums, its customers are looking for ways to recover. But the answer they get is:
"We will close the business. There is no technical advice, you should call your lawyer.".
