T 3.2 Negligent destruction of equipment or data

Negligence, but also untrained handling, can lead to the destruction of equipment or data that can seriously disrupt the operation of the IT system. Disruptions can also be caused by the improper use of IT applications, in which case incorrect results may be returned or data may be unintentionally changed or destroyed. The careless use of just one deletion command can delete entire file structures.

Examples:

• Users who turn off their computer when an error message appears instead of properly terminating all currently running applications or consulting an expert can inadvertently cause serious integrity errors in the databases.
• A spilled cup of coffee or a puddle of water after watering plants can penetrate into an IT system and cause short circuits.
• In a z/OS system, a system programmer was granted the right to call the ICKDSF program to format hard disks. When he urgently needed an extra hard disk to do his job, he selected a free hard disk from the pool of available disks, but entered the wrong address due to a typing error. He only gave the reply displayed in the System Log a cursory glance and responded to it immediately. The result was that a hard disk already in use was released for formatting and important production data was destroyed.
• A user who has made a habit of executing the rm deletion command on a Unix system without specifying the option enabling interactive confirmation prompts (-i) or who even disables the confirmation prompt completely using the -f option, runs a high risk of accidentally deleting the wrong files. This also applies similarly to the del *.* command available in MS-DOS.