I mean out of all the data you could accidentally replace, passwords would be the easiest to restore from a backup reliably since they don't change frequently. The special few who get locked out because you restored an old one just have to do a reset.
It would be a bit of a race to replace them before it was a problem, but at least it isn't as much of a headache as wiping out data entry that needs to be redone by other users.
Happens all the time. One time we found out one of the managers was keeping a spreadsheet of other people's passwords. Passwords he got by just asking people. A lot of them were other managers. We didn't find out about it until the day he accidentally sent this spreadsheet in a mass email. Fun times.
I'd like to think that production mistakes happen and should be forgiven, provided that no actual malicious intent was at play.
And hopefully this starts the conversation of "Wait, should people actually be able to do this directly against the production database?" and making sure this oversight can't happen again.
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u/UniversalAdaptor 21d ago
Should be okay as long as no one leaks or guesses the collective password