LxLabs boss found hanged after vuln wipes websites

Related to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648788 (Hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites)

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646451 (VAServ 'hacked' - all web sites and hosted VMs down)

When will people learn to make good backups? It seems almost every week there's another story here about how people lost data because they didn't have backups.

From his quotes page:

Tragedy of Life is that you can’t commit suicide.

I just read some of his posts. Definitely a man who lived extreme.

It screams "ego". I'm not surprised he had difficulty coming to terms with the damage done because of his software.

I feel for the rest of the family. I can't even begin to imagine what it feels like to lose three relatives to suicide in a such a short span of time.

Agreed, though losing two would also be crushing. This article makes it sound like the security exploit and data loss was closely related to his suicide, but I suspect it really boils down to the loss of his mother and sister. People who lose loved ones to suicide are many times more likely to commit suicide themselves.

Reading a bit of his blog, it also seems apparent that his father is an alcoholic and drug addict. His ego was almost certainly a defense mechanism, and that kind of thing can be brittle.

I'm confident LXLabs was still doing fine...this wasn't going to ruin the business. It's certainly not good for business to have a major security exploit, but he had plenty of customers (according to the article, something like an order of magnitude more than we currently have and we're supporting a couple of salaries), and was the sole developer. Weathering the loss of a few customers for a few months while the storm blows over wouldn't have been too difficult. People forget about security problems eventually. Obviously, security issues never made Bill Gates lose any sleep, or the man would simply never sleep.