The IT stories enterprise IT pros actually laugh at.
Volume 342, Issue 5 · 7 articles from 3 issues
A pen tester found a law firm CISO left BlueKeep unpatched and used a weak leetspeak password.
In The Register's PWNED column, Cobalt's Joe Brinkley, 'The Blind Hacker,' recounts pen-testing a business being acquired by a national law firm that had spent roughly half a million dollars remediating issues Brinkley found a year earlier.
The firm still failed to patch Windows machines against the BlueKeep remote code execution flaw, and Brinkley found that the CISO relied on a password that merely swapped letters for symbols.
The story is a reminder that tooling spend means little without patching and genuinely strong passwords.
A UK techie sent to China without a visa endures wasp stings, police detention and a marathon sales meeting.
In The Register's On Call column, a reader dubbed 'Carson' recalls being asked to fly to China the next day for a sales meeting about messaging products, with the employer promising to arrange a visa.
The trip began with three wasp stings and a 12-hour economy flight to Hong Kong, and still lacking a visa, Carson was sent onward anyway, ended up held overnight by Chinese police, and then sat through a 13-hour meeting.
The column notes sales calls can be even nastier than support calls.
BOFH satirizes 'holistic' troubleshooting after the Boss demands a softer approach to fixing a virus-hit laptop.
In this BOFH comic column, the Boss pushes IT to take a more 'holistic' approach to troubleshooting instead of its usual blunt methods.
The narrator responds by weaponizing the request, treating a virus-infected laptop with homeopathic dilution, amethyst pyramids, and rearranged office furniture instead of antivirus software.
The stunt backfires spectacularly when the user sets his office on fire trying to open his 'fourth chakra,' forcing a return to conventional antivirus software all along. The piece skewers management jargon divorced from technical reality.
The long-running BOFH column turns a content management system disaster into a cautionary tale about backups and blame.
The Register's long-running Bastard Operator From Hell column takes on a content management system that has swallowed 500 pages of corporate documentation.
Behind the satire sits a familiar operational reality: documentation platforms are rarely covered by the same backup and restore discipline applied to production databases, and nobody notices until content is gone.
The column also captures the organizational dynamic where the question of who is responsible arrives long before the question of how to restore. It is a comic piece, but it works as a prompt to check whether your wiki and CMS are actually in scope for recovery testing.
A reader recalls following a boss's advice to delete Exchange log files late on a Friday, taking email down.
In The Register's 'Who, Me?' column, a reader dubbed 'Phil' recalls a new job maintaining a large, centralized Exchange server, where late on a Friday email slowed to a halt because the server had run out of space, mostly due to a full log file directory.
Unsure of the right fix at that scale, Phil followed the boss's confident advice to delete data, which broke Exchange entirely.
The tale illustrates the risk of snap decisions on Friday afternoons and of assuming the boss knows best.
A 1990s Hong Kong rollout goes wrong when a team nods along but implements its own version of the plan.
In this Register reader anecdote, a project leader named Antonio is sent to Hong Kong in the late 1990s to oversee a reverse proxy rollout and briefs a 25-person tech team, who all nod that they understand.
Implementation instead deviates from spec, breaking load balancers and routers, and when Antonio investigates, a team member explains 'our way is better.' He realizes the team had understood the plan but never agreed to follow it, a cultural gap rather than a technical one.
The story closes on the lesson that 'tech is easy, people are hard,' especially in cross-cultural projects.
A reader recalls a boss who ordered discount 'printers' from a catalog that turned out to be just the stands.
In this Register 'On Call' style reader story, an Italian tech worker named Marco recalls his boss's obsession with a 1990s equipment catalog, poring over it daily like 'a kid waiting for Christmas' in search of bargains.
The boss eventually ordered what he thought were discounted laser printers, only for the delivery to reveal he had bought just the printer stands shown in the catalog photos, not the machines themselves.
The two useless stands were quietly hidden away with other failed bargains, and the boss's hopes of a promotion evaporated along with the budget he had wasted.