248 articles · page 1 of 5
The Register, Friday, July 17th, 2026
A support agent fixed an irate customer's phone complaint by pointing her to the charger still sitting in the original box.
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The Register, Monday, July 13th, 2026
A manager took down his company's entire network with a weekend-long Nmap scan, then blamed malware picked up on a business trip.
more → The Register, Friday, July 10th, 2026
A tech worker jury-rigged a server-room UPS to power a stadium control room and save a big match.
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The Register, Friday, July 10th, 2026
The BOFH and PFY endure absurd cross-department AI pitches at the pub, with chaotic results.
more → The Register, Monday, July 6th, 2026
An apprentice secretly automated a Y2K task, then later inherited support for her own buggy creation.
more → The Register, Friday, July 3rd, 2026
A VP mistook a disk error message for a hacker named General Failure infiltrating his computer.
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The Register, Thursday, July 2nd, 2026
Red teamers gained network admin access via social engineering and physical security gaps at a client site.
more → The Register, Monday, June 29th, 2026
A junior sysadmin dropped an expensive SCSI drive and fabricated a fault story to avoid consequences.
more → The Register, Friday, June 26th, 2026
The BOFH and PFY use an equipment amnesty day to dump broken gear and scheme insurance fraud, snaring their boss.
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The Register, Friday, June 26th, 2026
A security director ordered MFA rolled back, blaming it for an invoicing failure caused by buggy software.
more → The Register, Monday, June 22nd, 2026
A young programmer who fixed a dangerous file-deleting batch command got reprimanded rather than praised.
more → The Register, Friday, June 19th, 2026
A tech support worker calmly explains Word's spell-checker to a panicked colleague who had never seen red squiggles.
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The Register, Monday, June 15th, 2026
A bargain tablet purchase goes sideways when a 9-inch device arrives in a supposedly 14-inch box.
more → The Register, Friday, June 12th, 2026
"And uh... what are you doing?" the Head of Security asks, entering the Security office as I'm making my way to the exit – with a PC under my arm.
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The Register, Friday, June 12th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department.
more → The Register, Thursday, June 11th, 2026
A CEO kept all 2,000 staff passwords in an unsecured Excel file and refused MFA, despite prior ransomware.
more → The Register, Monday, June 8th, 2026
A consultant's faulty deletion script wiped hundreds of files, but he escaped blame by reporting it as a bug.
more → The Register, Friday, June 5th, 2026
A county IT staffer called to assist a police raid discovers no computers were needed after a tense standoff.
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The Register, Monday, June 1st, 2026
A contractor threw expensed oranges from a window, baffling a van driver while guards hunted the culprit in vain.
more → The Register, Friday, May 29th, 2026
A chandelier's clockwork mechanism destroyed network cables, shutting down an oligarch's investment firm's entire floor.
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TheHackersNews, Monday, May 25th, 2026
Weekly cybersecurity recap covering GitHub breach via poisoned VS Code extension, Linux kernel vulnerability, and Microsoft Defender zero-days.
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The Register, Monday, May 25th, 2026
An entry-level IT technician accidentally disrupted a clinic's network by misconfiguring VoIP phone ports but refused to claim overtime for the extra work required to fix it.
more → The Register, Friday, May 15th, 2026
A database specialist on-call during the Macau Grand Prix celebrates too early before discovering a critical application failure.
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The Register, Thursday, May 14th, 2026
A pentester gained root access by social engineering IT staff who prioritized being helpful over security procedures.
more → The Register, Monday, May 11th, 2026
A lab worker disguised a microwave as a PC to hide it from his overzealous manager.
more → The Register, Friday, May 8th, 2026
A technician is blamed for a PC malfunction that turns out to be caused by an unplugged network cable.
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The Register, Thursday, May 7th, 2026
A CISO advisor successfully guessed a client's admin password by trying "rosebud" from Citizen Kane, highlighting poor password practices.
more → The Register, Monday, May 4th, 2026
A council IT worker accidentally left an unauthorized DHCP server running on the network before taking a week off, causing chaos.
more → Security Boulevard, Thursday, April 30th, 2026
Two recent indictments highlight how criminal law struggles to apply traditional theft concepts to information, which cannot be stolen in the traditional sense.
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The Register, Thursday, April 30th, 2026
A fintech startup stored database root credentials and AWS keys in a password-protected Excel file on a shared intranet.
more → The Register, Monday, April 27th, 2026
Colleagues in the early 2000s pranked coworkers by creating looping PowerPoint presentations of their screenshots.
more → The Register, Friday, April 24th, 2026
A school's Wi-Fi problems were caused by a construction crane's wireless controller interfering with the 2.4 GHz band.
more → The Register, Thursday, April 23rd, 2026
A software client's data loss resulted from using the weak password 'admin123' and sharing it on Slack.
more → The Register, Monday, April 20th, 2026
A technician's PC rebuild was delayed because a new mouse was hidden under the case during troubleshooting.
more → The Register, Friday, April 17th, 2026
All that kit, and the fix was simply stepping aside
more → The Register, Thursday, April 16th, 2026
Your cybersecurity is only as good as the physical security of the servers
more → The Register, Monday, April 13th, 2026
Optimism is always risky, and defective hardware makes it indigestible
more → The Register, Friday, April 10th, 2026
The right person for the job didn't have the right passport for the job
more → The Register, Tuesday, April 7th, 2026
The world is rapidly becoming a more uncertain place, but The Register tries to offer readers one small point of certainty by always delivering a fresh Monday morning instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your errors and elucidate your escapes.
more → The Register, Friday, April 3rd, 2026
Easter means today is a holiday in much of the Reg-reading world, but that won't stop us from delivering another instalment of On Call - the reader contributed column that shares your tech support stories. To mark the occasion, The Register has revisited our mailbag of holiday-adjacent stories to tell the tale of a reader we'll Regomize as "Marcus," who told us he worked as a contractor for a "very large, very blue, blue-chip company" in the Netherlands and helped it prepare for Y2K.
more → The Register, Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
Welcome to Pwned, The Register's new column, where we highlight the worst infosec own goals so you can, hopefully, protect against them. Caffeine is an essential tool for most IT defenders, so, on balance, we're sure it has protected against a lot more exploits than it has caused. But in this case, the desire for everyone's favorite stimulant led to a massive breach.
more → The Register, Monday, March 30th, 2026
Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of things you did at work that had interesting consequences. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brad" who once worked as a security contractor.
more → The Register, Friday, March 27th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ewen" who told us that in the early 1990s he worked for a company that made fiber-optic devices that sound like serious pieces of kit.
more → The Register, Friday, March 20th, 2026
He would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for a meddling security team's fear of USB
more → The Register, Monday, March 16th, 2026
Client omissions caused the problem, so guess who was thrown under the bus
more → The Register, Friday, March 13th, 2026
Have you tried turning it on, never mind off and on again? This week, meet a jolly reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who thinks he may have broken our record for fastest tech support resolution, which we believe currently stands at 8.5 seconds.
more → The Register, Monday, March 9th, 2026
Ignorance really was the way to achieve bliss
more → The Register, Thursday, March 5th, 2026
Discovering, and explaining, the bizarre cause was harder than the job he was sent to do
more → The Register, Monday, March 2nd, 2026
Oh, the contortions required to debug strange errors!
more → The Register, Friday, February 27th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kent" who told us he once worked as a field engineer and shares a story of the time a client dispatched him to a private datacenter to replace a failed system board in an HP server.
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