Deliberately infect your systems with viruses that trigger when removed from your network.
How to make sure that the hackers delete your stolen data? I'm not a computer security professional, but here's an idea: infect it all with computer viruses that'll destroy their computers if they don't. If...
@Philipp I know that Microsoft Word and Excel documents can both be infected with viruses. I wouldn't be surprised if you could infect your database files with them, as well.
I would be surprised. The reason why MS Office documents can contain viruses is because the MS Office file format supports embedding of code in an own programming language ("macros") which can do a lot of things. But that's something unusual and very peculiar to this one software. Also, more recent versions of MS Office do no longer execute macros in office files from untrusted sources because of this security problem.
Oh, and trying using Excel for the purposes you usually use an SQL database for would be a tremendously stupid idea for a lot of technical reasons unrelated to security (and also a couple security-related issues, but those would be the least of your problems).
Cascading Style Sheets are not a way to handle big data, and they don't contain viruses either. None of the NoSQL databases I ever worked with was able to run arbitrary code when importing a file which would do anything outside of the database. Which NoSQL database you ever worked with could do that?
CSV files don't contain executable code either, and no, they are certainly not a way you would handle big data. You might use them to import data into a real database where you then handle it. But now you have a database again.
This is a really bad answer, for lots of reasons which I won't explain. However the idea of making your files report unauthorized use/access is not new, and can make sense in some specific cases (think of canary tokens, backdoors, call-home functions, DRM protections, etc.)
@nick012000 Even if this was possible, it would be an extremely terrible idea for so many reasons that I can't contain them in a comment, but here are a few off the top of my head. 1. If you mess up your "security" code, you could destroy your own data or server or that of your legitimate clients. 2. If you could do this, why infect their machine instead of just deleting the leaked data? 3. Any sort of location or system check you would want to make could be easily spoofed if the attacker knew about the security measures. 4. This is likely illegal.
@reed I'd also note that this is only a partial answer, as it doesn't discuss retasking the international weather-control satellite grid to turn their headquarters into a block of ice! Or designing the viruses to cross the species boundary from computer to human and turn them into a zombie slave army... Anyway, sorry Nick012000, but this answer is a bit far on the Hollywood end of the spectrum!
@PeterMortensen I guess a semi-related example might be the Sony rootkit fiasco. Not a perfect comparison, but the answer does call out the potential liability and legality issues. It's an interesting idea, but the rest of the comments have the bases covered on how unrealistic and impractical it is.
Discussion on answer by nick012000: H…
Discussion on answer by nick012000: H…