Guardia Civil systems crash days after its director is charged

Guardia Civil systems crash the day its director is charged

On the very same day that the director of Spain's Guardia Civil (military police force) was charged in a court case, the force's computer systems went down. At the same time, files are being deleted from the environment of Marloka — the person named by the investigating judge. The timing has set off every alarm.

According to initial reports, there is talk of damaged hard drives, corrupt backups and the need to restore emails from copies dating back six months. Some sources mention the use of commands such as 'rm -r', a recursive deletion typical of Unix systems. The message is clear: someone is doing a digital cleanup.

Accident or selective deletion?

The official version will most likely point to a technical failure. However, the profile of the comments gathered in specialist circles suggests the outage bears all the hallmarks of an evidence-destruction operation. The recurring question is whether it is possible to trace the origin of the outage. The technical answer is yes — unless the logs have also been deleted. And there lies the dilemma: with backups that 'do not exist or are corrupt', traceability fades away.

It is not the first time a public body has suffered an 'IT incident' just as a incivil charge draws near. The difference here is how blunt the clues are: a 'format c:' is not a random error. It is a declaration of intent.

Who is deleting what, and why exactly today? The question hanging in the air: how much of what is being deleted today will turn up tomorrow in a miraculously intact backup, and how much will be lost forever?