Page 159 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
My eyes track the specific syntax the hacker is using to inject the SQL query. It is messy, utilizing a recursive loop that is not standard practice—it is exceptionally lazy.
And I know that exact loop. I spent three months completely rewriting it two years ago.
“I know him,” I say, the realization hitting me like a physical blow.
“What?” Ethan demands.
“The admin signature,” I say, pointing to the hash string on the screen. “The encryption key they are using to bypass the firewall. It is Greg.”
“Greg?” Owen asks, totally confused. “Greg from Accounting?”
“Greg the Junior Dev,” I snarl. “The one we fired during the early beta phase. The one who swore he permanently deleted his admin keys.”
“He sold his credentials,” Ethan realizes, his voice turning deadly.
“He must have,” I say, a heavy wave of guilt washing over me. “I successfully revoked his credentials, but he must have buried a hard-coded backdoor in the legacy library files before he left. I missed it.”
“So it’s a disgruntled ex-employee?” Tessa asks, her voice incredibly weak. “He just wants revenge?”
“Greg is not smart enough to run a botnet this size,” I say, typing furiously to verify my working theory. “He is a script kiddie. He doesn’t have the massive capital required to rent this much server space. Someone is actively backing him.”
I run a quick trace on the packet header. Usually, hackers route through Tor or a dozen secure VPNs, but Greg is sloppy. He routed it straight through a shell company.
Server Owner: N-Tech Ventures.
“N-Tech,” I read aloud. “That name sounds familiar.”
“It’s a holding company,” Tessa whispers, looking significantly worse than before. “For Nebula.”
The room falls completely still.
“Nebula,” Ethan repeats, the name a venomous curse. “Markus Vance.”
“Greg is the weapon,” I realize, quickly connecting the dots. “Markus is the bank. Nebula hired our disgruntled ex-employee to burn us down. It is corporate sabotage.”
Tessa lets out a soft, strangled sound. “Markus told me if I crossed him, he would make sure Mosaic didn’t last the year.”
“He’s trying to make good on that exact threat,” Owen says grimly. “If we go down, Nebula absorbs our market share overnight.”
“He is not going to win,” I say. My fingers fly across the keys with renewed aggression.
Now that I know it is Greg, I know the weak spots. Greg was lazy, and he reused old code. If I can find the matching hash in his injection script, I can reverse the data flow.
“How long?” Ethan demands.
“Forty minutes,” I calculate. “To fully isolate Greg’s backdoor and patch it.”
“We have an hour and a half on the timer,” Tessa says, her voice gaining a little strength even though she is actively clutching her stomach. “You can do it, Asher.”
Her pure belief in me acts like a drug, sharpening my focus to a razor’s edge. I dive completely into the code, my world narrowing down entirely to syntax and logic.
For twenty agonizing minutes, the room is completely silent except for the rapid clatter of my typing and the steady hum of the cooling fans.
Then, a sudden sound cuts right through the digital hum.
A soft, strangled gasp.
I violently spin my chair around.
