I got curious — how did people even catch viruses on their computers? Was it something a friend sent? Or maybe they downloaded a cracked game or some shady program? Share your stories — would be interesting to read.
I got curious — how did people even catch viruses on their computers? Was it something a friend sent? Or maybe they downloaded a cracked game or some shady program? Share your stories — would be interesting to read.
I worked for a small company, not an IT job, this happened like 10 years ago.
The office administrator lady got an email from an unknown address. The email was in Italian, she couldn’t speak Italian, but we had an Italian client, so it was not unexpected that we got an email in Italian. The email had an attachment, a docx file. She downloaded it, opened it then Word asked if she wants to allow running macros embedded in the document, and she obviously clicked yes. We had a small Linux file server, and the virus running on her PC encrypted several tenthousand excel files before it was noticed that something is happening and her machine could be switched off.
No problem - said the boss, we only lost a half day of work, as we have an offsite backup, it runs every night, we can just restore yesterday’s data. Unfortunately the backup stopped half years ago, but no one checked the logs…
Man this Story hat so many plot twists in it…
Takeaway for the Story is: If you don’t have a backup of your file and you don’t monitor the backup process and you don’t tested that your backup can actually be restored and you don’t have a redundancy backup… Than yours file isn’t saved.
Gotta check those backups
We recently had a funny problem. Our service ran fine, but a postgres upgrade failed because some pg internals were broken (broken ref ids). Dumping the DB also failed for the same error. Reading and writing was still fine, though. So we restored backup after backup… no dice. They all had the same issue: it was working for the service but we couldn’t perform any maintenance. Ultimately we had to “manually” dump the data of the service and replay it into a fresh db. That took quite long. But that was interesting, since even the verification of the backups didn’t help us notice that kind of corruption.
I have had to do similar with a db at my job.
Backups passed verification but we had a lot of weird issues, like queries getting stuck, or not returning records that were definitely there.
Ended up having to manually recreate the schema and import records from a manual data dump because something in the db file itself was messed up.