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.

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.

Data is absolutely sacrosanct, and cryptographic systems are the beating heart of data security. Encryption protects financial transactions, secures corporate networks and safeguards healthcare records. Encryption is considered fundamentally reliable, but a technological shift is challenging this assumption.

For many years, organizations have had to accept a compromise in email security: They've had to balance speed versus depth.

Despite decades of efforts to the contrary, email remains one of the primary means of entry for cyberattacks, with vectors ranging from phishing to business email compromise (BEC). Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report shows that most breaches still involve a human element, such as account credentials stolen through phishing.

Email deliverability is often reduced to a simple question: Did the email send?

Phishing emails are no longer easy to spot by bad grammar or obvious fake links. Modern attacks are carefully crafted to pass basic security checks and blend into everyday business communication. This makes phishing email analysis less about instinct and more about understanding the technical details hidden inside an email.

DMARC failures are usually traceable. The problem is rarely DMARC alone. In most cases, the failure is due to an issue regarding DNS, SPF, DKIM, domain alignment, forwarding, or sender setup. DMARC then exposes that problem because it evaluates whether SPF and/or DKIM passed and aligned with the visible 'From' domain.

The promise of Platform Engineering is seductive: Build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), abstract away the 'spaghetti' of Kubernetes manifests and CI/CD pipelines, and watch developer productivity soar.

The merger of env zero, a provider of an infrastructure as code (IaC) management platform, and CloudQuery, a provider of a cloud asset management platform, is being driven by an effort to create a platform engineering solution that will make it simpler to programmatically manage IT environments on an end-to-end basis.

Platform engineers should view System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 compliance as an engineering framework rather than merely a checklist to follow.

World Backup Day is often seen as a simple reminder to save your data, but this year, security leaders say backup strategies must evolve into fully tested, secure, and recovery-focused resilience plans.

Solutions Review's Executive Editor Tim King compiled this roundup of World Backup Day quotes from experts for 2026, part of our ongoing coverage of the enterprise storage and data protection market. These insights originally appeared in Insight Jam, a community focused on the human impact of AI and the future of work and learning.

Kernel version numbers in Linux are famously arbitrary. Linus Torvalds changes the major digit when the minor number feels too big. However, version 7.0 is shaping up to be a substantial release, solving some decade-old annoyances and making the kernel future-ready. Here's a quick look at everything you should know about Linux kernel 7.0.

Build a Future-Proof Career in Cybersecurity by Learning the Most in-Demand Programming Languages of 2026

Database Design Mistakes: Critical Errors That Hurt Performance and Scalability

Welcome to our eighth annual 'CRM Top 100' issue, where we highlight the hottest trends and technologies in the three pillars of CRM-customer service, marketing, and sales-as well as the 100 leading providers.

While the AI boom is widely understood as a contest for elite engineers and pricey GPUs, behind the headlines a related struggle is unfolding in the skilled trades. As tech companies pour vast sums into building data centers, a shortage of electricians, technicians and machine specialists is emerging as a critical constraint on growth.