[GTALUG] cron scripts **BOOM**

[Darryl Moore]

so I have about 100 servers running 16.04 spread over North America.

Today it became apparent that the root user cron script was deleted on 
all 100 of them. The script is at /var/spool/cron/crontab/root and 
everything I had has been deleted and replaced with

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (- installed on Fri Dec 28 08:18:31 2018)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)

crontabs were all originally installed using the crontab executable. 
when I redo it the same way I get the proper crontab file but with this 
above header added. This was never the case before. I do not have 
automatic updates turned on on any of my machines. The date stamp in 
this header is within a few seconds of the above on all my machines. I 
also have a few machines running Armbian, and they are exactly the same.

This is a major F*up for me and I have no idea how it happened. Has 
anybody else had similar experiences? I'd love to know.

regards,
darryl