Ever Lose Thousands of Records to a Corrupt Database? The Air Force Did!

We’ve all been told the lesson, back up your files. In this day and age, we seem to forget to do this, given the generation of ransomware and malicious software that looks to do everything from stealing your bank account details to holding your system hostage. It would seem that the lesson wasn’t learnt by the US Air Force who has now lost over 100,000 records of investigations thanks to a database corruption.

The Air Force revealed the news alongside Lockheed Martin, stating that the company runs the database but could not explain how the corruption had occurred or if the data was even retrievable. The revelation comes after two weeks of work by Lockheed to recover the database which contained everything from complaints and sexual harassment claims (these claims are backed up elsewhere as well the Air Force have since confirmed).

So where was the backup? The company has yet to answer this question and are still investigating how it occurred, considering the possibility that it could even have been caused intentionally given the impact that it will have on previous cases and even current cases which are suffering “significant delays”. The notification to congress was summarised as a “five sentence notification”, something which has now forced the groups involved to double their efforts to try to retrieve information stemming all the way back to 2004.