What he did was equally an act of heroism (in face of Internet history) and stupidity (in face of his own life). Perhaps, he should just have wiped and destroyed the disks, and have it "seemed like a system crash at a bad timing" caused it :)
But he saw a problem and wanted to fix it. You're basically saying he should have left the problem where it is and pretend itsr not there, which is not what engineers typically do. Can you blame him for that?
You are ignoring the vastly more likely 5) he wiped a test machine that lacked relevant information or 6) he wiped a new machine that had no data from him or his company.
If you break something, starting over and not doing the same thing is often a vastly better than trying to debug what happened and then fixing it.
We aren't arguing about what he did. We are arguing about why he did it. Did you seriously just not read the entire conversation above the comment? The technical aspects of exactly what he did aren't important.
I think he's too clever for his own good. This machine should have been considered beyond salvage, remove any precious data (you did have a backup, didn't you?) and re-image. I've had to recover data from hacked boxes a few times for 'brand new customers' and the first thing I do with a system like that is to make sure I get a console wired up and the uplink disconnected. No point in taking chances.
So wait, he did "an immense amount of pen testing", while at the same time this was something he snuck in at the last minute on a whim? Something doesn't add up here.
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