IT OPERATIONS

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When the wi-fi is down at the office, there are a Ghz-illion potential reasons why, ranging from major construction to the kitchen microwave.

When marketing-comms agency Highwire first moved to its New York City office three years ago, CTO Jason Mayde had to consider the space’s structural elements—more like obstacles, really—when placing access points and tuning signal strength.

First, the building’s 30-foot-high ceilings required anchored pole extensions to keep the access points (and signal) closer to the floor. Next was the issue of the building’s concrete floors, which “might as well be a mirror,” Mayde said, because when beams hit that surface, they bounce and create scattered, unpredictable coverage. The building has exposed iron-support structures, which are pure wi-fi blockers (“They’re your lineman,” Mayde said).

Even a corner conference room presented coverage difficulties, thanks to a nearby stairwell that acted like a fire-protected and hardened “monolith,” complicating placement of access points.

But the wi-fi has worked, and that’s what matters when it comes to helping employees do their jobs. Mayde and other networking pros share how they find and handle wi-fi trouble spots.

Troubleshooting 101.—BH

      

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CYBERSECURITY

Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock, Unsplash

As companies debate whether to transfer more IT help desk responsibilities to self-service portals powered by AI tools, one question stands out: Is this safe?

In theory, an internal or external attacker could use a company’s AI-powered self-service portal to initiate an unauthorized credential reset, set up a fake business email, or other nefarious activities. That can lead to devastating consequences: Sophos shared in its State of Identity Security 2026 report that 71% of organizations experienced an identity-related security breach in the 12 months leading up to the report, with data theft and ransomware among the most common consequences of successful vulnerability attacks.

Ramy Rahman, a senior solutions engineer at ArmorCode, said that while automating password resets may not seem like a mission-critical vulnerability, this process can be weaponized by attackers.

“We’ve already seen prompts to authenticate be used in attacks, so you really need to make sure that you’re training the users to understand what is approved ways for you to be able to do password resets,” Rahman said.

IT help desks that use AI, including a chatbot, for self servicing could expose sensitive data through unsanctioned usage, produce inaccurate outputs that hurt employee decision-making, or could even face issues around compliance and accountability if not used correctly, according to Witness AI.

There are some areas where AI can help.—CN

      

SOFTWARE

Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

When it comes to updating legacy software, AI can help—but IT pros need to be smart when they change things in an environment with potential knowledge gaps.

Antique software can still be mission-critical, and teams need to take care in how they manage transitions to newer platforms.

“One of the biggest challenges is, how do I step up and capture—as fast as possible—all the knowledge that has been already dumped into that code?” Agustin Huerta, SVP of digital innovation at Globant, told IT Brew. “That code, in a way, is a representation of the history of how that software came to be.”

History lesson. Organizations are often trapped by their legacy infrastructure, in part through predatory licensing and knowledge capture, said Paul Holland, CTO of Amdocs Mainframe Modernization. That combines with brain drain as people leave the workforce.

Why history is important when upgrading legacy systems.—EH

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 10,000. That’s how many “frontier deployed engineers” Anthropic plans to train by the end of 2027 through its Claude Frontier Academy. (ITPro)

Quote: “Some organizations have already discovered that the cost of tokens for coding assistance is much higher than the cost of human software developers.”—Gareth Herschel, a VP analyst at Gartner, on growing token costs (Computerworld)

Read: Why the language we use to describe “rogue” AI incidents matters. (Dark Reading)

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Amelia Kinsinger

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