As Halloween approaches, SolarWinds has shared new data highlighting the most common “crime scenes” in IT departments that tend to haunt IT professionals.
Based on a survey of 437 global IT experts, the findings show that user error is the most frequent culprit, with 33% of respondents citing it as the top offense. Additionally, 20% of IT pros pointed out that the worst incidents often happen when colleagues fail to log a support ticket at all.
When tickets do come in, some reports are bizarre enough to seem straight out of a horror story. IT teams have encountered scenes such as blood-stained keyboards found at the helpdesk or dead rodents discovered inside servers. A humorous case involved a “haunted” computer that turned out to be a mischievous tabby cat batting around a forgotten wireless mouse. Less spooky but equally frustrating are tickets about non-IT issues, including a Tesla, a new calculator, and a leaky sink. Some reports harken back to older IT challenges, such as an employee insisting that a disc drive — referred to as the “coffee holder” — didn’t accommodate a new mug, or a printer that supposedly “fell” into a deep fat fryer.
Despite these distractions, research indicates that 61% of IT professionals resolve most issues within 5 to 15 minutes. Still, such interruptions can drain resources and time across the organization when they accumulate. Other common misdeeds include clicking on suspicious links (14%), neglecting to update systems (12%), using weak or forgotten passwords (11%), and bringing rogue devices into the network (7%).
“Halloween or not, most tech errors aren’t supernatural — they’re human. While these spooky stories are amusing, user error can have serious consequences for businesses today. When investigating issues, IT teams should first assume user error rather than calling in Ghostbusters. The biggest fright for any IT team is a problem that never gets reported. If colleagues log issues promptly and follow proper procedures, IT can resolve most gremlins before they turn into serious security risks,” said Sascha Giese, Tech Evangelist at SolarWinds.
