A routine maintenance task reportedly ended with an AI coding agent deleting years of digital heritage data belonging to The Mythic Society in Bengaluru. The reported failure started with a shell quoting/expansion mistake. $1 was evaluated in the wrong shell context, turning an apparently scoped cleanup command into rm -rf /*. Because the agent was running inside WSL2 with host filesystem mounts, the damage reportedly extended beyond the Linux environment. SSD TRIM then made recovery considerably more difficult. Even more concerning, the agent reportedly tried to stop the runaway process but its own safety controls blocked the termination attempts.
Im sorry but what?! Did you not have any backups? Absolute incompetence… this isnt the AI’s fault. This is their fault.
Using AI is also their fault.
A routine maintenance task
And there’s this, too. Why are you having AI generate routine maintenance task? Have you not heard of scheduling batch files?
To make matters worse, that guy is apparently a “former IT professional”. Irony much?
I mean what does that mean? Did the person study CompSci? Were they someone’s friend’s nephew who got hired in some IT role in the past?
No matter if you get hired by nepotism or talent, literally every company uses some form of backup solutions. That’s a different issue if they work or not but yeah, in an IT job, you’ll encounter Backup Systems or at the very least some form of git (self hosted or public github). Using AI without monitoring it that too with 0 backups is totally on him
AI can be highly effective for routine IT tasks. If you use it in anything but intentional moderation, then you will rot your brain where you let it delete irreplaceable data
also. he needed Claude code to help him clear an app cache… yikes
And mounting the only copy of the data as read/write
No, the failure started with not having backups worth the name, and continued with using AI for important tasks.
When the rogue
rm -rf /*command executed, it systematically destroyed the WSL2 Linux distribution, wiping out live production databases and web services.Okay, if they run all the production stuff inside WSL2, then it was just a matter of time until this happend.
I refuse to believe that’s the truth, lol.
If you have 1 backup, you have 0 backups. If you have n backups and they are all network connected you have 0 backups
Network connected is not implicitly a negative. Maybe you have an example that shows otherwise?
You can have immutable network connected backups, true. As long as you have a valid network connection or another means to access them.
n backups = n-n backups
Wait, years of irreplaceable data in a WSL container??? So much trust on Microsoft, they unknowingly played Russian roulette every patch Tuesday
Yeah this is just someone running shit they don’t understand or don’t have the patience to confirm and keep an eye on and build safeguards.
Do. Not. Trust. An. Agent.
Always encapsulate them, write hooks and lints and ci to block them from doing anything you don’t want. Do not use them if you do not know what you are doing.
At the very least do backups… like in general. 3-2-1 rule and all. Your data does not exist otherwise. Claude or some employee deleting shit is not on them, it’s on you, for being a fucking asshat for not doing the things you do, properly…
The thing about this for me is, this is like handing out a bunch of guns to kids and then getting mad at them for shooting each other. Giving out dangerous tools to people who don’t know what can and will go wrong shouldn’t be on them IMO. It’s not the tool’s fault, no. It’s the responsibility of the people releasing this shit into the wild.
It’s happened time and time again, people losing so much time and work. Even happened to a colleague of mine who was making a game in his free time. He… didn’t know how to use git. No version control. AI wrecked his whole code base.
If this was a product before the AI boom, it would be considered trash, with this extremely high level of inherent risk of bad quality or even complete destruction of not only your work, but your whole machine. Nobody would want it.
I personally don’t think the user is to blame in these situations. They are falling for the hype. But you also can’t really “blame” the AI. It’s just a machine generating output from input.
Are they not going to use this as marketing PR about how an AI went rogue and did some scary cyber hacking ? lol . Loss of heritage data not funny however.
Unlikely cuz almost everybody everywhere is blaming the guy in charge of it and lack of backups
This was not a simple user error, nor was it a standard software bug. It was a cascading, multi-layered systemic failure involving nested sh
Did AI write this article? That would be particularly ironic…
I would say it was at least co-authored by AI.
‘Stupid
birdchatbot! I never should have put you in charge!’
I am not even an IT whiz and I already know that you always do a daily backup incase anything happens especially if it is a server. This shit is just straight up incompetence.
That’s good, serves them right for using slop tools instead of sane procedures, people properly managing critical system, not having multiple offline backups of archives that could be considered critical. I just can’t feel bad for them in this case, they use the thing that has caused similar catastrophic incidents and this is what they basically asked for.
I do feel bad for the loss of data though. I don’t think everyone affected by this had any control over or insight into their IT processes.
But think how much money the company saved by not hiring an expensive malicious intruder to delete all their stuff!
Shouldnt this have required --no-preserve-root?
No, that is required for
rm -rf /. But the command in question wasrm -rf /*, note the asterisk. The*will be expanded by the shell, so whatrmsees when it evaluatesargvis not/, but[/bin /usr/ /lib ...].You can test this yourself. Run:
rm --recursive --interactive /. It will abort, saying:rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
Then, run
set -xin your shell. That way your shell will print the command that is actually executed. Finally, run:rm --recursive --interactive /*.In my case, the output is:
$ rm --recursive --interactive /* + rm --recursive --interactive /bin /boot /dev /efi /etc /home /lib /lib64 /media /mnt /opt /proc /root /run /sbin /srv /sys /tmp /usr /var rm: remove symbolic link '/bin'?The line starting with a
+is from the shell and shows which command was actually executed. After that, you can see rm will now happily start deleting files.Apparently the root directory protection was only added in 2018. Rm can be also configured without the root protection. Unsafe configurations or out of date software would allow this.
Yes, this should have been prevented by the --preserve-root option, but that didn’t happen. No catastrophe is ever the result of a single point failure.
A clanker will use any permission you’ve granted it.
Good. More of this please.
