IT manager left root login active for Halloween kids' visit, causing a shutdown mishap
A senior IT staffer let his office terminals stay logged in as root for a bring-your-kid-to-work day, and his nine-year-old daughter accidentally ran a shutdown command.
In the 1990s, a company operating an IBM RS/6000 invited employees to bring their children for a Halloween celebration. Anticipating disruption, the IT manager launched a series of chained Unix programs early in the day and left the workstation terminals logged in with root privileges for his kids to watch. His nine-year-old daughter, recalling a film where a child saved the day with a SHUTDOWN command, typed the command herself, causing the entire system to halt.
The manager later spent 36 hours restoring the environment. The anecdote, shared by a reader known as “Stockley,” appears in one outlet’s reader-contributed “Who, Me?” column, highlighting the risks of leaving privileged sessions open around children.
Why it matters
It shows how unsecured admin access can lead to costly outages, even in informal workplace settings.
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