We had a Programmer/DBA who did a very small system that was high visiblility. It had one form that accessed one table, it was a survey type of thing. Several thousand users input data all month and a report was created at the end of the month. All changes to the system always happend after the monthly report ran. The Programmer/DBA was working with limited test space so he copied the files over and edited a script to keep database size small. He figured he would remember to delete the extra code before moving to PROD.
Since he was a DBA he had the authority to move stuff to the production environment.
He did.
He also bypassed all QA/CM.
The script he edited… did I mention it was an event procedure for the form load and now started with Delete * from tbl_data?
No one suspected anything until the last day of the month and the report ran and only showed one record (the last user to fill out the form).
This had been going on for a month…backups? he figured since it was a small system weekly was good enough.
Way back in when, departments would put up NetWare servers to get away from corporate IT and the big bad mainframe…corporate IT decided to centralize all department servers under corporate IT and started building their empire. They made all the servers standard. They all had standard apps. They took the server from the Tax Department and erased the non-standard apps. Like the one that was being used to file Federal Income Taxes two weeks before the IRS deadline.
And the punchline of course…backups? We don’t need no stinkin’ backups.
I became the Network Admin for Tax and Finance. Not answerable to IT.
Not that big of a deal, but this did happen at my school. We had been having network problems (we couldnt get into a program we use at Admissions called Banner), and we feared the system may crash. The next day, we find out that the entire IT staff had gone on a retreat. Without having anyone behind to help if the system did crash. What happened next? The system crashed, and we couldnt do any work at all until the IT people returned from their retreat and fixed things.
