He just walked out of the building into the cold night, looked up at the stars, and wondered how many other engineers across the world had just downloaded that same file tonight.

The output was flawless. Cisco IOS 15.7(3)M8. 87,000,000 bytes of memory. Uptime: 2 minutes.

He plugged in. Putty opened. The black terminal window flickered.

Marco, the night shift network engineer, didn't believe in ghosts. He believed in CVSS scores. The new vulnerability disclosure was a 9.8—unauthenticated, remote code execution. The attacker could own the box just by sending a malformed packet. And this old Cisco 2900 was the backdoor into the entire municipal power grid’s SCADA network.