Is technology evil?

[Asclepias]

I work in the IT field. I know millions of computers and other backend servers that are not connected to the internet. Matter of fact there are more computers that are not connected than connected. I think youre confused on what is going on. No one in their right mind would connect an important database to the internet without the benefit of encryption. I dont know where you are getting this information but you may want to check your sources.

This is very interesting. So, for example the latest Equifax(?) data breach, how was that possible if the consumer credit files were not connected to the Internet?

Simple. Hackers. It was a Apache struts vulnerability on a server that was used to house a web application for users to dispute things on their credit report. The server that housed this application was then used as a launching pad to get inside the private network and from there they found the files. This server most likely was sitting in what is called a DMZ which typically sits between 2 firewalls. The servers that housed those files were not in anyway connected to the internet. Do you understand how networks are set up? It would be sheer madness to allow the public to access your internal network. There is a lot of things that went wrong and it was primarily human error and lack of proactive monitoring.

This is super interesting. So let me ask this other question about it. Could those hackers have deleted people's credit files? Can such deleted files be recovered? I know I asked once an IT technician to recover some archive for me from a tape, and it was impossible. Are there time limits for backups against hackers?

Depends on what permissions they had after gaining access. Typically you have read only unless you are an admin. If they had admin rights then they could probably delete the files. Depending on the OS in question say Linux or Unix the files are unrecoverable on that specific hard drive. However, most databases have a incremental backup every night that in this case (magnitude of importance) should have been stored off site.

Are they like tapes? That is pretty impossible to recover from.

Depends. Its cheaper and more secure to use tape but its faster and more efficient to use secure cloud storage.