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The Hex Files
History and stories
- The beer barrel letters that cost a queen her head
- The “Nigerian prince” scam is older than email
- The magician who hacked the wireless in 1903
- The intercepted telegram that helped pull America into World War I
- The con man who sold the Eiffel Tower
- Enigma was broken by habits as much as by math
- The gift that listened for seven years
- The first computer bug was a real moth
- The first computer password, and the first password theft
- The encryption company secretly owned by spies
- Creeper and Reaper: the first worm and the first antivirus
- Phone phreaks and the toy whistle that controlled the phone network
- The first spam email was a product announcement
- Elk Cloner: the first virus spread on floppy disks
- The 414s: teenagers who got in with default passwords
- The movie that led to a presidential order on computer security
- A 75-cent accounting error that caught a spy
- Captain Midnight took over HBO for four and a half minutes
- The first PC virus came with its authors' phone number
- The Christmas card that jammed the world's networks
- The Jerusalem virus waited for Friday the 13th
- The Max Headroom TV hijacking was never solved
- The Morris worm: the night the early internet slowed down
- The first ransomware arrived in the mail
- The hacker who rigged radio contests to win a Porsche
- The Michelangelo virus panic of 1992
- The 1994 bank heist done from a computer in St. Petersburg
- The famous hacker who mostly just asked
- Ariane 5: the rocket brought down by old code
- Where “phishing” got its name
- Back Orifice: a remote control tool released at a hacker conference
- CIH: the virus that could stop a computer from starting
- How Toy Story 2 was almost deleted
- Melissa: the virus that shut down company email
- Y2K: the disaster that didn't happen
- ILOVEYOU: the email everyone wanted to open
- Mafiaboy: the teenager who knocked big websites offline
- Klez: the worm that faked who sent it
- The worm named after a soft drink
- The Anna Kournikova virus: a picture that was not a picture
- Nimda: the worm that came in through every door
- The 2003 blackout started with a silent alarm
- The worm that spread around the world in ten minutes
- Blaster: the worm that kept restarting computers
- Mydoom: still the fastest-spreading email worm
- Sasser: the worm that grounded flights
- “Samy is my hero”: the worm that spread through friend requests
- The music CDs that secretly installed hidden software
- Albert Gonzalez and the store Wi-Fi that leaked millions of cards
- The Storm Worm rode the headlines
- The weeks a whole country was knocked offline
- Zeus: the banking trojan that watched people sign in
- Conficker: the worm that infected millions and then waited
- Koobface: the fake video update that spread through friends
- RockYou leaked 32 million passwords in plain text
- Operation Aurora: when Google said it had been hacked
- Stuxnet: the code that broke machines
- DNSChanger: when the internet's address book was swapped
- The PlayStation Network was dark for 24 days
- The security company hacked through a spreadsheet
- The security firm undone by one reused password
- DigiNotar: the company that vouched for fake websites
- Knight Capital lost control of its trading in 45 minutes
- One hour, one journalist, his whole digital life erased
- The LinkedIn leak that came back four years later
- How a heating contractor's login led to a retail breach
- The fake tweet that briefly crashed the stock market
- Yahoo's breaches stayed hidden for three years
- CryptoLocker: the ransomware that set the template
- Heartbleed: the flaw in the padlock itself
- Mt. Gox lost hundreds of thousands of bitcoins without noticing
- Shellshock: an old bug in the internet's plumbing
- The Sony Pictures hack: when attackers set out to destroy
- Carbanak: the bank robbers who came in by email
- The breach that took 22 million background checks
- The first attack to turn off a power grid
- The bank heist stopped by a spelling mistake
- Mirai: when cameras and routers took down the internet
- GitLab deleted its database and found its backups did not work
- The typo that took down part of the internet
- WannaCry and the accidental kill switch
- NotPetya and the server saved by a power cut
- Equifax: the update that was not installed
- Atlanta's city government went back to paper
- Meltdown and Spectre: the flaws inside the processor
- Baltimore had no written recovery plan when ransomware hit
- How ransomware evolved from floppy disks to extortion
- Zoombombing: when strangers crashed the video calls
- The Twitter hack started with a phone call
- SolarWinds: the attack that came through a trusted update
- The data center fire that destroyed backups too
- The day Facebook disappeared from the internet
- The warnings before Ireland's health service shut down
- When thousands of office email servers were broken into at once
- Colonial Pipeline: one old password, one week without fuel
- Log4Shell: the flaw hiding in a line of text
- From passwords to passkeys: sixty years of signing in
- Lapsus$: teenagers who talked their way into big companies
- The day Canada's debit cards stopped working
- 23andMe: reused passwords exposed millions
- MGM Resorts: one phone call to the help desk
- MOVEit: one flaw, thousands of organizations
- The 2024 outage that had to be fixed one computer at a time
- The missing sign-in step that stalled US health care payments
- The XZ back door: a two-year con caught by accident
Scams and phishing
- How phishing works when your email is in the cloud
- When a vendor's bank details suddenly change
- How to spot a phishing email
- What to do if you clicked a phishing link
- Why would your boss want gift cards?
- Text message scams: unpaid tolls, missed deliveries and fake banks
- QR codes are links you can't read
- The pop-up says your computer is infected. It isn't.
- When the voice on the phone isn't real
- What to do if you paid a fake invoice
- “Your page will be suspended”: fake social media warnings
- Calls about your business listing that are really a sales trap
- Charity scams follow every disaster
- Microsoft will not call you about a virus
- Requests for employee tax forms are a favorite of scammers
- The email asking to change where a paycheck goes
- The email that quotes your old password and makes threats
- The renewal receipt for something you never bought
- The fake invoice that asks you to call
- How to read a web address before you sign in
- “Someone shared a document with you”
- Fake recruiters and job offers
- Letters that look like your domain renewal
- The top search result might be an ad for a fake site
- Five pressure tactics every scam uses
- I gave someone my sign-in code
- Phishing without the spelling mistakes
Email and Microsoft 365
- Your computer is protected. Is your email?
- Check your mailbox for rules you didn't create
- How to stop criminals sending email as your business
- Sharing files without sharing too much
- Why some emails are marked “External”
- Who really owns your Microsoft 365?
- Shared mailboxes beat shared passwords
- Before you turn on Copilot, check who can see what
- What not to send by email, and what to use instead
- Adding people from outside your company to Teams
- Get back an earlier version of a file
- How to give someone access to your mailbox the right way
- How to send a file that is too big for email
- Sharing your calendar without oversharing
- Teams or email: which should you use?
- When and how to send an encrypted email
- Why your emails end up in other people's junk folders
- Why “recall this message” usually does not work
- What to put in an out-of-office reply
- To, Cc, Bcc and Reply all: when to use each
- Calendar invites can carry scams too
- What a Microsoft 365 group actually is
- Where deleted email goes, and for how long
- OneDrive or SharePoint: where should this file go?
- What to do when your mailbox is full
Passwords and sign-ins
- Attackers don't always break in. Sometimes they ask.
- People leave. Their accounts often stay.
- Why everyone at work needs a password manager
- Length beats complexity: what makes a strong password
- Text codes, apps and keys: not all MFA is equal
- How one reused password can open everything
- What dark web monitoring actually does
- Why your IT administrator uses two accounts
- The trouble with shared logins
- Locked out of your work account? Here's what to do
- Security keys: the sign-in method phishing cannot fool
- Should you use “Sign in with” buttons?
- Sign in once: what single sign-on means
- SIM swapping: when someone steals your phone number
- Why “Summer2025!” is not a strong password
- Why the sign-in rules change depending on where you are
- Why we no longer make you change your password every 90 days
- Security questions are the weakest part of your account
- Getting a new phone? Move your sign-in app first
- Should you let the browser save your passwords?
- “Unusual sign-in activity”: real alert or scam?
- Keep your account recovery details up to date
- How to share a password when you have to
- My password showed up in a data breach
Devices and protection
- Why antivirus became EDR
- Attackers use flaws that already have a fix
- What ransomware actually does
- What to do if a work laptop or phone is lost or stolen
- Why every work laptop should be encrypted
- Work email on personal phones, done safely
- When software stops getting security updates
- The USB drive in the parking lot
- How to tell a real remote support session from a scam
- Charging your phone in public
- Check which apps can use your camera, microphone and location
- How to make a laptop battery last longer
- Printers are computers too
- The “update your browser” warning that is really malware
- The real cost of free and cracked software
- What mobile device management does for a business
- Why updates keep asking you to restart
- Why Office blocks macros, and why you should leave it that way
- Browser extensions can see everything you see
- Why your work computer will not let you install things
- Lock your screen every time you walk away
- I spilled something on my laptop
- Traveling with a work laptop
- What to do with old computers
- Why computers get slower over time
- Your phone needs updates too
Backup and recovery
- Is your Microsoft 365 backed up?
- The 3-2-1 backup rule, in plain English
- Why OneDrive sync isn't a backup
- A backup you haven't restored is only a hope
- How much can you afford to lose, and for how long?
- Backups attackers can't reach
- What to do if you see a ransom note
- What to do if you deleted an important file
- How far back should your backups go?
- Checklist: what your backup should include
- External hard drives wear out
- Is your phone backed up?
- Keep an emergency sheet you can reach when everything is down
- What to do if you cannot get into the office
- File backups and full system backups: what is the difference?
- Is your business software backed up?
- What a recovery plan should cover
- Battery backups: why servers and network gear need one
- Our server has stopped working
- Laptops need backing up too
- What cloud failover means
Networks and Wi-Fi
- Why guest Wi-Fi and staff Wi-Fi should be separate
- Why is the Wi-Fi slow?
- What a firewall actually does
- What a VPN does, and when you need one
- Printers, cameras and smart TVs belong on their own network
- Working on public Wi-Fi safely
- What happens when your internet goes down?
- Why internet calls break up, and how the network fixes it
- One network for a whole building
- Why cabling still matters in a wireless world
- A safer home office network
- Fixing Wi-Fi dead spots
- How to run an internet speed test that tells you something
- Power over Ethernet: one cable for data and power
- What is a VLAN?
- What is SD-WAN?
- Why a home router is not enough for a business
- DNS filtering: blocking bad sites before they load
- Wi-Fi 6, 6E and 7: what the numbers mean
- 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz: why Wi-Fi has bands
- What a network switch does
- Fast internet can still feel slow
- Your firewall and Wi-Fi need updates too
- The office internet is down
IT basics
- What “the cloud” actually means
- What a server is, and whether you still need one
- Domain names and DNS, explained
- How an email gets from you to them
- Why “have you tried turning it off and on again?” works
- How long should a work laptop last?
- What is VoIP? Business phones in plain English
- Why software became a subscription
- Why IT asks you to submit a ticket
- IT terms in plain English
- File extensions: the letters that tell you what a file really is
- How to find your computer's name and details
- How to take a screenshot that helps IT fix the problem
- Keyboard shortcuts that save time every day
- Memory and storage are not the same thing
- Name files so people can find them
- Why your IT should be written down
- What is an IP address?
- What the padlock in your browser does and does not mean
- What generative AI is, and what it is not
- How to report an IT problem so it gets fixed faster
- What “software as a service” means
- What website cookies are
- Viruses, worms, trojans and ransomware: what is the difference?
- Why IT asks you to clear your browser cache
- What encryption is, and where you are already using it
The business side of IT
- Managed IT or pay-as-you-go: what's the difference?
- What co-managed IT means for your IT team
- How to budget for IT without surprises
- What a technology roadmap is, and why you want one
- What to expect in your first month with a new IT provider
- Is it time to replace your office phone system?
- Questions to ask any IT provider
- UCaaS and CCaaS: what the letters mean
- Make sure your business owns its own accounts
- Getting a new hire ready for day one
- Buying licenses and hardware through an IT provider
- Questions to ask before you sign up for business software
- Setting up staff to work from anywhere
- What an acceptable use policy covers
- When the person who knows your IT leaves
- Why you need a list of every device and account
- Shadow IT: the apps your business does not know it uses
- Does your business need an AI policy?
- What to decide before a cyberattack happens
- Who else can get into your systems?
- Moving offices: the technology checklist
- Choosing a business internet connection
- Server in the office, or in the cloud?
- Opening a second location: getting the technology right
- What downtime really costs a business