Backup failure causes retrial

An appeals court in Miami last week threw out the conviction for murder of Randy Chaviano, the South Florida Sun Sentiel reports. Chaviano had been found guilty in July 2009 of the fatal shooting of a man in his apartment in Hialeah, Florida. The court threw out the conviction because, when Chaviano chose to launch an appeal into his conviction, no official record of his eight day trial appeared to exist.

A subsequent investigation revealed that the court stenographer, Terlesa Cowart, who has responsibility for creating the official record of the trial, was using a stenography machine capable of simultaneously capturing the transcript digitally and on paper. Unfortunately, in this case, the machine ran out of paper during the trial, and the transcript was only kept digitally. After the trial, the official court record was transferred to Cowart’s desktop computer and wiped from the stenography machine.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, though, Cowart’s computer was struck by a virus, which wiped the only remaining copy of the transcript. Without an official record of the conviction, the appeals court had no choice but to order a retrial.

Information Security is the art of protecting the Confidentiality, Integrity and Accessibility of data. Security experts often concentrate on protecting confidentiality at the risk of overlooking accessibility, which is often the target of a computer virus. A proper data warehousing and backup policy would have averted this disaster, and an anti-virus policy could well have helped too (though there is, of course, no guarantee that the virus would have been detected).

Remember, Information Security should be free – the money saved not running a retrial could easily have paid for a backup and data warehousing solution. Following a rigorous Risk Management process will highlight the cost (and likelihood) of events like this, and will help to justify the cost of proper mitigations.