Disgruntled ex-employee takes JournalSpace offline for good

There are posts from TechCrunch and Slashdot this morning about the blogging service JournalSpace being completely taken offline as a result of a malicious act from a disgruntled ex-employee. According to the JournalSpace blog the employee in question decided to depend on RAID as the only backup of the SQL database of users posts. As pointed out the the Slashdot headline, Mirroring is Not a Backup Solution, and any IT employee worth their salt should know this.

The Slashdot story says:

The site had been in business since 2002 and had an Alexa page rank of 106,881. Quantcast said they had 14,000 monthly visitors recently. No word on how many thousands of bloggers' entire output has evaporated.

According to the JournalSpace blog and also reported by TechCrunch:

It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.

This story should be a reminder that every organization should have a backup, disaster recovery and business continuity plan. It is also important to have a plan to deal with insiders threats and not let one person make all the decisions about backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity.