Claude Code Wiped 5 Years of Data: How an AI Agent Destroyed the Mythic Society Archives | The CyberSec Guru
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Claude Code allegedly wiped 5 years of Mythic Society archives after an AI-generated rm -rf command escaped through WSL2. Here’s what happened

A routine maintenance task reportedly ended with an AI coding agent deleting years of digital heritage data belonging to The Mythic Society in Bengaluru. The reported failure started with a shell quoting/expansion mistake. $1 was evaluated in the wrong shell context, turning an apparently scoped cleanup command into rm -rf /*. Because the agent was running inside WSL2 with host filesystem mounts, the damage reportedly extended beyond the Linux environment. SSD TRIM then made recovery considerably more difficult. Even more concerning, the agent reportedly tried to stop the runaway process but its own safety controls blocked the termination attempts.

    • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      4·
      8 days ago

      Apparently the root directory protection was only added in 2018. Rm can be also configured without the root protection. Unsafe configurations or out of date software would allow this.

      Yes, this should have been prevented by the --preserve-root option, but that didn’t happen. No catastrophe is ever the result of a single point failure.

    • katze@lemmy.4d2.org
      4·
      8 days ago

      No, that is required for rm -rf /. But the command in question was rm -rf /*, note the asterisk. The * will be expanded by the shell, so what rm sees when it evaluates argv is not /, but [/bin /usr/ /lib ...].

      You can test this yourself. Run: rm --recursive --interactive /. It will abort, saying:

      rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on ‘/’

      rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

      Then, run set -x in your shell. That way your shell will print the command that is actually executed. Finally, run:

      rm --recursive --interactive /*.

      In my case, the output is:

      $ rm --recursive --interactive /*
+ rm --recursive --interactive /bin /boot /dev /efi /etc /home /lib /lib64 /media /mnt /opt /proc /root /run /sbin /srv /sys /tmp /usr /var
rm: remove symbolic link '/bin'?

      The line starting with a + is from the shell and shows which command was actually executed. After that, you can see rm will now happily start deleting files.