This article sounds so incredible to me, I think I might have been holding my breath reading it. These are two major mistakes that the company is responsible for, not the author. Why would they let anyone in on the production password and do direct queries onto that database instead of working on a different environment, it's laughable that they sent this to their customers admitting their amateurism. Secondly, no backups? At my previous project, a similar thing happened to our scrum master, he accidently dropped the whole production database in some kind of the same situation. The database was back up in less than 10 minutes with an earlier version. It's still a mistake that should not be possible to make, but when it happens you should have a backup.