‘Twas the week before Hackmas
And all through their houses
Not a tester was working
Nor moving their mouses

The findings were listed in reports with care
In hopes that bugfixes would soon be there
The hackers were nestled all snug in their chairs
While bitstreams of 0day flowed through twisted pairs

And Heather on her treadmill desk, and John on a plane,
Had just muted the testers so they could try to stay sane,
When out on the Twitter there arose such a storm
That even the interns were stirred from their dorms

Away to the internet, we flew screaming “WOWZERS”,
Ate up all the bandwidth (with our non-BHIS browsers)
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Went totally unnoticed by the hackers below

When what to my wondering eyes did a path beat,
But a felony libelslander and eight clueless retweets
With McAfee’s arrival (he has altcoins to sell)
I knew in a moment that this would not go well

More rapid than Oracle vulns the spectators came
And the internet raged, and shouted, and shamed:
“No disclosure, no research, no Google vuln dev!”
“Yes to export control and online conference reg!”

To the top of the feed! to the blogs big and small!
Now yell away! yell away! yell away all!
As the arguments heated and no-one knew why,
I took just a moment, to look at the sky

And up on the housetop the snowflakes they flew,
Lit by festive lights and the blinky ones too –
And then, in the blinkenlights, I saw just how pretty
The world could be, in this little city

As I blinked once or twice and turned back around,
I realized my phone wasn’t making a sound.
It was silent and dark, something big was afoot,
The internet was gone, completely kaput!

A feed full of tweets flung into the black,
May never result in (not so) clever come-backs.
My eyes – how they twinkled! my dimples, how merry!
As the router’s lights blinked just as red as a cherry

My mouth curled upward, becoming a smile
As the snow just kept falling, all of the while
Not a sysadmin now would leave their cozy home
(Unless they were out in the snow just to roam)

The internet was over, at least for the night
And out with it went our crazed Twitter fight
We were back to being what we were all along:
A whole bunch of hackers, for right or for wrong

As I turned out the lights and went off to bed,
I felt – just for once – I had nothing to dread
Soon we would all return to our work,
But for now, there was nowhere for malware to lurk

So laying one finger on a power strip switch,
My home office was silenced, the darkness like pitch.
With every bit settled, secure for a while,
I whistled to bed, with an ear-to-ear smile.

I made sure to exclaim, though no-one was in sight –
Happy Hackmas to all, and to all a good night!