IT Baseline Protection Manual - The Information Warfare Site

Threats Catalogue Deliberate Acts Remarks
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T 3.2 Negligent destruction of equipment or data
Negligence, but also untrained handling, may lead to the destruction of
equipment or data which can severely disrupt further operation of the IT
system. This can also be caused by improper use of IT applications, leading to
incorrect results or inadvertent modification or deletion of data. Careless use
of a single deletion command can delete entire file structures.
Examples
- Users who switch off the computer when an error message is displayed
instead of correctly closing all running applications or consulting an expert,
can cause serious integrity errors in stored data.
- Moisture arising from spilt coffee or from plants being watered can cause
short-circuits in the IT system.
- A user who has a developed a habit of running the delete command rm
under UNIX without activating the parameter (-i) which ensures that the
user is asked to confirm any deletion before execution of the command or
who actually disables the confirmation prompt with -f runs a high risk of
accidental deletion of files. The same applies to the command del *.* under
MS-DOS.
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IT-Baseline Protection Manual: Oktober 2000