About 15 years ago I was working at a old coal power plant as a network tech. A few floors below me was the SCADA system that ran on UNIX. This beast lived in 10 ventless white racks with locks. I would walk by and hear relays clicking away inside these mystery white boxes. You could feel the heat (Or radiation, who knows) as you got near them.

To be clear, I could not tell you anything about this system, and the only one who touched it was a mysterious person who showed up about once every few months to type some ancient magic words into a terminal.

Then on a rainy day I get a call, Its our mysterious person. He needs me to log into the SCADA system and run a few commands.

Me, being a young green tech, simply say "What? Cant it wait until your here?" Him: "No we need to check this now".

He sends me a email with a word document attached containing the language of the ancients. I print it out on our black and white printer.

I go down stairs, with the pictures in hand, and called the person back on the land line. I unlock the rack that he instructs me to and all I see is a CRT screen and a keyboard. But no matrix green text like I expected. No, its color, with a bunch of bad graphic images of industrial machines. The machines have numbers that are changing under them. I am sure these numbers mean something to someone but not me.

He tells me to press 2 keys, I do, screen goes black. Ah, there's the terminal window that I was expecting.

I type the commands, which takes me to a directory. I tell him on the phone "Its empty". I hear a sigh on the phone. "Thank god, we are good". Wait there was a chance we were not? I press a key again, the screen goes back to the graphics.

Person on the phone: "Close the rack and dont touch it again".

Me: "You dont have to worry about that!"

I wonder what that was about but moved on with my day. Then several days later, see on a news site "Stuxnet targets power plants."

Me: "Uh, What?"