“Did I accidentally make it self-destruct? Who knows. But it looked pretty epic.” A UI/UX designer at the Ministry of Digital Economy forced a bot that posed as a recruitment specialist to delete itself with the help of a single team. How it happened

"This week, the Ministry of Digital Affairs team posted a case study about the Diia Summit 2023 on Behance. Everything is beautiful and solid. But as it turned out, the case study received attention not only from the design community," he wrote on LinkedIn.

After that, someone with the nickname Katherine Charles wrote to the specialist on Telegram. “It starts off classic: ‘Hey there! We’re looking for talented designers for exciting logo projects. Are you free?’ I think, okay, let’s find out for fun what they offer there. I ask about the details of the projects and tasks. In response, I get something strange: ‘This is some kind of publishing company. I’m Katherine, a hiring administrator. What’s your name and where are you now?’ Hmm. Instead of answering the question, there’s a repetition of the same phrase. I ask again. And again, a copy of the previous text, word for word. Here everything is clear: either a bot or a very boring spammer,” Kuznetsov said.

The designer decided to have a little joke. "I'm sending him a command:
rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. For those who are not familiar with the topic, this is a hard command in Linux, which means “delete everything on the server without the possibility of recovery”. And here the magic begins. First, the bot’s avatar disappears. And in a minute, our entire chat is simply erased. It looked as if the bot really deleted itself after the command. Did I accidentally make it destroy itself? Who knows. But it looked very epic,” noted Ioann-Mark.

He urges not to spam designers. "We will find a way to joke even with bots. One command and your entire database can fly to nowhere," the IT expert said.