"Man deletes company with a line of code," turns out to be a hoax

Do you remember that story of a man deleting his company’s and his clients’ data with a single command, rm -rf? Well, it turns out that the whole story was a hoax. Marco Marsala, the owner of the company, told an Italian paper that it “was just a joke.” Marsala reportedly spread the rumour about the code wiping out the database and his backups as a viral marketing campaign, cites a post on StackExchange’s forum . In an earlier report, we mentioned that Marsala’s company, Genoa Hostings, host to over 1500 websites, had lost all its data owing to Marsala accidentally entering an incorrect rm -rf command. The command, in the right situation, can systematically wipe out all data on a system. When presented with the “facts,” many users on tech forums were suspicious of the tale, especially when, apparently, UNIX and the updated tools currently available to administrators have built-in safeguards to prevent something like this from happening in the first place. As Marsala puts it, it was all in good fun. Any publicity is better than no publicity, right?