Computer crash wipes out years of Air Force investigation records

Defense One:

The U.S. Air Force has lost records concerning 100,000 investigations into everything from workplace disputes to fraud.

A database that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted last month, destroying data created between 2004 and now, service officials said. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin, the defense firm that runs the database, could say why it became corrupted or whether they’ll be able to recover the information.

Apparently they did have backups, but ermm… the backups are corrupted too.

Remember folks, there’s no point making backups of your data if you don’t sometimes test that the backups actually work. That’s perhaps timely advice given the prevalence of ransomware right now.

(There’s no indication that the US Air Force’s database corruption is due to malicious meddling, by the way).

Update: Good news. The US Air Force says it has managed to achieve a “full recovery” of its data.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.