IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

One day, a busy IBM-compatible mainframe began slowing to a crawl. Hundreds of programmers noticed immediately—some even resorted to banging on the server room window whenever the system became unusable. The problem appeared after a microcode upgrade, but nothing pointed to an obvious cause.

In this episode, Jack Smith talks to Matt about an extraordinary piece of low-level troubleshooting that led deep into the internals of ...

Artificial intelligence didn't invent Shadow IT—it made it invisible. In this Jack's Rant, Jack Smith explores how AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude have fundamentally changed the way employees solve problems. No servers under desks. No rogue software installations. Just a browser tab and a prompt. From confidential data and AI-generated scripts to fragmented workflows and "ChatGPT says..." becoming the new expert opi...

Every year, the Melbourne Cup pushes Australia's betting infrastructure to its limits. In 1991, a known software bug turned one of the busiest days of the year into an IT disaster. As millions of bets poured in, CPU utilisation unexpectedly collapsed and the betting system ground to a halt at the worst possible moment.

Jack Smith is joined by veteran mainframe specialist Neale to revisit the incident, explain why the bug had been a...

Scambaiters like Kitboga, Jim Browning and Pierogi educate millions, waste scammers' time, and undoubtedly prevent people from becoming victims. As a security professional, I genuinely appreciate what they do.

But every time I watch one of these videos, I find myself asking the same question: What happened in the missing five minutes? How does a legitimate remote support session suddenly become full control over the scammer's compu...

Smart cities promise better transportation, connected infrastructure, and improved services—but what happens when everything is connected a little too well? In this episode, our guest shares the story of a security assessment in a major metropolitan smart city where network segmentation had been overlooked, creating unexpected paths between public networks and critical infrastructure. One memorable discovery showed that,...

Opening a tab at a bowling alley shouldn't require handing over your driver's license or national ID card. Yet many businesses still ask customers to leave government-issued identity documents behind as collateral, often storing them in plain sight with little thought for privacy, physical security, or the risks involved. In this Rant, we ask a simple question: just because a practice has existed for years, does that make it accept...

No one expects a cybersecurity incident to begin in the cardboard industry. Yet as our guest Kayne McGladrey explains, cybercriminals don't care what your company manufactures—they care about opportunity. In this episode, Kayne shares how an unexpected conversation with a golf buddy led to a cybersecurity contract, and why one of the most unassuming industries turned out to have a story worth telling.

Together, we explore the...

Once upon a time, Change Management meant raising an RFC, preparing a rollback plan, and surviving the Change Advisory Board. Today, it also means stakeholder engagement, communication plans, adoption metrics, workshops, and apparently having the emotional intelligence of a licensed therapist

Whether you're a project manager, systems engineer, change manager, or simply someone who's ever heard the phrase "we've always done it this ...

It was supposed to be a routine hiring exercise. A candidate receives a technical assignment, reviews the provided material, and prepares a solution. Then someone notices that the "anonymous" dataset isn't anonymous at all. What follows is an uncomfortable discovery involving confidential business information, questions about data handling, and an unexpected conversation with legal.

In this episode of IT Horror Stories with Jack Sm...

Printing is one of those technologies everyone assumes should have been solved years ago — until someone can't print invoices, shipping labels stop coming out, or 50,000 customer letters suddenly disappear into a print queue somewhere. In this episode, we take a tour through the strange and surprisingly complex world of printing: from small desktop printers and office multifunction devices to enterprise print servers and indu...

Welcome to the story of a perfectly known and visible laptop that somehow became critical production infrastructure inside a warehouse environment — without going through proper validation, testing, or operational review. The system worked, solved an immediate problem, and was quickly integrated into daily operations... right up until the laptop entered sleep mode and warehouse activities ground to a halt.

What followed was a...

We explore a hypothetical ransomware scenario that mirrors what many organizations could face today. Imagine a normal day where systems suddenly become inaccessible, data is encrypted, and the scope of the attack starts to unfold in real time. What follows is a race against the clock, with teams trying to understand what's happening while keeping critical operations alive.

More importantly, we focus on the response and recovery: th...

The Boeing 747 is often cited online as proof that aviation still runs on floppy disks — but the reality is a bit more nuanced. In this Rant, we take a closer look at how certain older aircraft, particularly some 747-400 configurations, still use floppy disks to load navigation data into their Flight Management Systems. It's not about being outdated — it's about reliability, certification, and systems that have proven t...

Conducted during a busy release weekend, the failover test exposed gaps not in the technology itself, but in coordination and communication. While production ultimately stayed unaffected, the situation quickly escalated as subcontractors weren't aligned, assumptions didn't match reality, and information didn't flow when it mattered most.

We unpack how a well-intentioned test turned into a coordination challenge, where timing, depen...

In this short episode, Jack takes a look at the current state of the IT hiring market — where job postings seem plentiful, but actual opportunities often feel strangely elusive. From "entry-level" roles asking for a decade of experience to companies searching for the mythical full-stack, cloud, DevOps, security expert all in one person, we discuss the growing gap between job descriptions and reality. With a bit of sarcasm and...

A few hundred field engineers. Real humans. With vans. And jobs. All coordinated by a device roughly the size of a coaster and powered by something suspiciously similar to a phone charger.

For months, it runs slow but flawlessly. Tickets dispatched. Routes optimized. Managers happy.  The tiny silicon hero hums along in its noble plastic case, bravely pretending it's not one 'apt upgrade' away from a crisis.

Join us a...

Jack's Rants dives into the world of banking mainframes and the batch jobs that quietly keep everything moving — until one of them doesn't. What starts as a routine overnight run turns into a multiple transactions on thousands of accounts that didnt happen in the real world, but the mainframe says something else.

Want even more info ? Read our show notes and related blog post related to this episode : https://blog.ithorrorsto...

This episode we unpack what a DDoS attack actually is, using the specter of Anonymous as a cultural touchstone rather than a how-to villain. We talk about why high-profile groups target services, what it feels like in real time when traffic spikes and systems start gasping, and how panic can make things worse.

Instead of glorifying attackers, we center on mindset: staying calm, recognizing early warning signs, and understanding the...