Lost in the Rinse Cycle

A woman placed her external hard drive in a dirty laundry basket and carried it downstairs. The family cat strategically placed itself on the laundry, which obscured the view of the drive from the woman’s boyfriend, who shooed away the cat and quickly threw the clothes in the washing machine. On went the machine and away went the data.

A graphics designer about to finish a beautiful 3D logo job for a customer decided to have a drink to celebrate. When he returned from the kitchen to admire his work, he accidentally flipped over the glass—allowing the computer to soak up the lion’s share of his libation. The project was gone, and so was the designer’s happiness. Kroll ended up saving the day, however.

Imagine working in one of the most challenging and remote environments of the world and being confronted with a serious data loss. This is what happened to a resources company in the Gobi Desert. They accidentally deleted a VMware machine and several data snapshots. Luckily, IT got in touch with Kroll Ontrack, which set up a remote data recovery session via a satellite link. The link enabled Kroll engineers to work around-the-clock to recover the data in a much shorter time than originally anticipated. (Photo: Mark Fischer / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic)

When an Australian pool and spa shop was being robbed, the burglars decided to try to destroy any identifying evidence by pouring the large stock of hydrochloric acid on the shop floor and counters, consequently damaging the shop’s computer and point-of-sale terminal. The shop owner was able to get a very smelly drive to the local Kroll Ontrack lab, and although the computer was very badly damaged, all the data was recovered.

An iPad containing important drilling data was dropped off the side of a Nigerian oil rig. Water is the No. 1 most common cause of damage to mobile devices; this incident—despite the fall into salt water—proved to be no problem.

A business professional set his backpack, containing his iPad, down to give his shoulder a break while waiting for the city bus. The bus pulled up, but before letting on the passengers, the driver realized the bus was situated in the crosswalk. The business professional didn’t pick up his backpack in time, and the bus crushed the pack’s contents, including the iPad. Despite the devastating physical damage to the electronics, the data was recovered.

After an employee was fired, he took solace at a fast-food chain and plotted his revenge. Revenge included logging on to the network he still had access to and deleting as much data as he could get his hands on using the restaurant’s free WiFi. The story had a happy ending for the employer, as terabytes of data were recovered, and the culprit was identified by matching his food purchase order and payment information to the time of the crime and network used to delete the data.

A man pulled into a shopping center parking lot and parked his car. When he opened his door, he noticed that he had badly parked in two spots. He climbed back in and slammed the door, not noticing that he had dropped his camera on the road. As he recorrected his parking several times, he felt something crunch beneath a tire, which turned out to be his camera. Kroll Ontrack was able to recover the photos.

Viruses can be silent and deadly. So when a malware attack infected 30,000 workstations at a Middle Eastern oil company, swift efforts were required to halt the damage and restore business continuity. Kroll not only identified the virus that was causing the damage, but also recovered data from several critical servers and workstations.

A RAID5 storage drive came into the Kroll Ontrack Madrid office after several people noticed a red blinking light on the RAID and alerted their IT manager. The IT manager said the light didn’t mean anything and in a matter of three weeks, the RAID stopped working. Kroll restored 100 percent of the data.