3 DATA BREACH HORROR STORIES

1. Toy Story 2 – (Almost) disaster

Talking about horror stories on relevant data loss, the epic fail of Pixar with “Toy Story 2” is on the top of our list. During the production, a line of code somehow deletes almost 90% of the movie. All Toy Story’s backups were recorded on tapes. But unfortunately, the Pixar didn’t test the system as they should and they notice that backups were broken only when they tried to restore data. Something went wrong with the tapes and all files were lost. The deadline for the release was extremely close and the Company just have a months old version of the file tree.

But the Pixar got lucky. One Company’s employee was working from home and have saved some movie’s copies on his personal computer a few weeks before. This way, the Pixar can restore all data and the movie was saved. Just one human error could cost the Pixar its reputation and an entire movie that eventually went on to gross nearly $500M and an Oscar nomination.

2. The Government is no exception

Stories about data loss are not necessarily outdated. Just a few years ago (2014, to be exact), when Cloud Computing and Disaster Recovery systems were already popular, the State Department of USA showed to the world how bad things could get without a Disaster Recovery plan.

A software patch update crashed the State Department’s Passports and Visa system, affecting over 200.000 travellers worldwide. When the system was down it was impossible to check any passport or Visa. The State Department have made the data backups but the system itself was not protected against that kind of incidents.

3. A short story of failure: Ma.gnolia

Remember when I said that 43% of companies go under after a significant data loss? Well, Ma.gonlia is one of them. Even if you may be don’t remember it, Ma.gnolia was a bookmark sharing website which works pretty good until 2009. Users could bookmark a website for a later view, both publicly and privately, without any need of local save. That means that users can access to their websites from any device. The company suffered a huge data loss which compromise the entire bookmarking system and user accounts. Althought the several expensive attempts to recover all data and save the business, the situation was really bad and Ma.gnolia had to shut down.

Better to be safe than sorry!

Longer your systems are down, more you pay your employees to sit down and wait. In addition, you will bring in less revenue because of the downtime. Data loss can hit any business in any moment, so it’s good to be well-prepared. If you really care about your business and you want to defend it from data loss with the proper Backup & Disaster Recovery measures, we can help you!