16/01/2021
News that over 200k records have been accidently deleted from the police database reminded me of a situation that arose about 20 years ago.
Almost every Monday morning a client called me and asked me to restore a backup of his database. Investigation of the logs found that the same member of staff kept deleting the database and for reasons better known to the owner he didn’t want to reprimand or dismiss the employee. He requested I put things in place to prevent deletion.
At first I added a simple dialogue box that said something like “You are about to delete the database” with options “Proceed and Cancel” followed by the previous alerts that needed two confirmations before actioning the delete. This changed nothing.
Thinking that the operator might just be hitting the enter key multiple times I changed the default to the cancel option so that an actual mouse movement was needed to select the confirm button. That changed nothing.
I wondered if once the mouse was in the right place could it be that she was clicking multiple times to action the delete, so I then modified the dialogue such that each moved to a different place on the screen. Still nothing changed.
It was believed that data was being lost because the backup did not contain all the data entered on Friday, so, I set a script to create a backup when the first proceed was clicked. This then presented a dialogue that a backup was underway and locked the database until complete. You would think that pause would have given this staff member time to reflect on what she was doing but it didn’t. She still went ahead and deleted all, but at least we now had an up to date backup.
By now I was beginning to wonder if business owner either didn’t believe me when I was telling him who was responsible for this action or was somehow prepared to tolerate what she was doing, so, I set up a recording one Friday afternoon and showed the owner and his wife what was happening. The girl was intentionally deleting the data. Seeing it happening seemed to do the trick because the girl was assigned other duties and later left. Now I wonder if she got a job with the police!
