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Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 81 points 4 months ago (17 children)

I don't want to sound like a know it all here because I recently was reminded by a nice Lemmy person to actually TEST my backups, but damn. Every part of that is so dumb. I also have backups stored by a different company in addition to locally storing really important info. If your stuff is hosted and backed up by the same people, what happens if your account is randomly suspended or hacked or some other issue (like ai)?

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  • [–] 50 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

    If your company can be taken down by Camden the college intern, it can be taken down by Claude.

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    People somehow think that they should give more permissions to Claude than to Camden. (Is that a name? To me that's a borough and an eponymous beer.)

    E: oh yeah, and the market.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Of course it's a name. Camden borough/town/market is named after William Camden, 1551-1623. Using surnames as given names is a relatively common Americanism.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    If your stuff is hosted and backed up by the same people, what happens if your account is randomly suspended or hacked or some other issue (like ai)?

    This should be one of the first questions you get asked when you’re being interviewed for the position 2 to 3 levels beneath the position of ultimate responsibility. And if you don’t immediately have an answer, the interview is over.

    Fucking idiots had it coming

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It's an easy question to answer but a more difficult question to remember to ask. But I guess that's what those 2 to 3 levels are for 😏

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago*

    Ooo, good point. Management can be shit a lot of the time.

    But with all of those layoffs because of AI, those 2 to 3 levels get collapsed into one, and we’re left with the trainees running the show.

    And here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Repeat after me:

    "An untested backup does not exist"

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Not to give myself more credit than I deserve, but I did test them upon setup, and had restored from backup 2 years ago. I didn't have any ongoing checks other than to ensure a backup happened. I have since instituted yearly checks of the backups themselves, but I did feel dumb when I realized how vulnerable my data was.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    So in the event of a failure, you'd be okay with reverting to that last known good backup from a year ago?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Yes, but also I have to draw a line somewhere. I have a daily backup process. Some data is backed up to multiple places. I have backups of my backups. I cannot ensure that all three of the daily backups I run are fully restorable. I would love to know with 100% certainty that they all execute perfectly, but at the end of the day I have to trust the tools and processes I put in place for backups. A yearly checkup is probably more than sufficient for my purposes. I'm sure for certain businesses or sectors they need to be more on top of things, but I could manage just fine if all of it disappeared tomorrow. It wouldn't be awesome for me, but it'd be manageable.

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