HE CRASHED HIS

He crashed his whole company's entire weekend and then blamed it on a virus. So I saw this on the register, a reader who we'll call Roger. Used to manage teams at a mid-sized company with engineering, marketing, and a factory floor. One boring Friday, he started messing around with Nmap, which is a tool used to map every device on a network. How it had everything set up and decided that he'd run a full scan of the entire company over the weekend just to see what turned up. And then he went in on Monday, he found his laptop missing and the head of IT waiting for him with what Roger described as a slightly haunted, slightly wild-eyed look. I've had that. It turns out the IT boss and the company's chief operating officer had spent the whole weekend unable to connect at all. The network was completely fried. They traced it back to Roger's. They unplugged it and the network sprang back to life instantly. Roger got hauled in for an interrogation and he played. He basically cover story about picking up a virus during a recent trip to the company's China office. And it bought his laptop, spent nearly a week in isolation for viruses that were never actually there. He got stern talking to about being careful while traveling and then was sent back to his desk. And the whole Nmap was still installed on his laptop. I've done something similar myself. Work. There was somewhere with over 4,000 machines and pretty much running off one internet. Three of us decided to run an Ookla speed test at the same time. The numbers were the whole network. We accidentally DDoSsed our own company and took the website of one of the UK's leading online offline. Because the speed test slams the it can in both directions to measure the maximum. Different tools, but the same lesson on shared infrastructure. An everyday diagnostic action can behave exactly like an attack if nobody accounts line. So if you're on a shared network, maybe don't run the full Nmap scan over the weekend just to see what happens. And maybe don't run Ookla speed tests on multiple. It might just take down your whole business.