IT Boss Left Root Session Open for Bring-Your-Kid-to-Work Day
The Register, Monday, August 3rd, 2026
A nine-year-old's accidental Unix command caused 36 hours of repair work on company systems.
An IT manager at a 1990s company running an IBM RS/6000 Unix system left a root-level terminal session open while his children visited for Halloween festivities.
His daughter, inspired by a movie scene, typed the SHUTDOWN command at the terminal. The resulting damage required the boss to spend 36 hours performing repairs.
The incident illustrates the security risk of leaving privileged sessions accessible to untrained users, even inadvertently.