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I chuckle. “Do I look like the kind of guy who—”
Before I can finish my sentence, my phone starts buzzing violently in my pocket. Text alert after text alert, it sounds like it’s two seconds away from exploding. We quickly readjust our clothes, Aurora hastily smoothing her skirt while running her fingers through her hair, before I check on my phone. It’s a series of urgent alerts from Luka.
We’ve got a problem.
System’s under attack.
There’s a virus holding our data ransom.
Where the hell are you? Answer!
This is bad, Misha. Get your ass up here, now!
“Everything alright?” Aurora asks me.
“We need to get back upstairs. Something’s going down.”
Chapter 15
Aurora
It feels like the whole building is in a state of panic. Luka’s gathered all the employees in his division together, a stern look on his face. In the week I’ve known him, I’ve only known my supervisor to be a calm and collected man—albeit grumpy. The fact that his face is as white as a sheet tells me all I need to know about the gravity of the situation. Something terrible has happened.
“We’ve had a security breach,” Luka explains gravely at the head of the room. “Someoneapparently clicked on a link from an unverified sender.” He sends averypointed glare in Buck’s direction.
My fellow intern shrinks in on himself like a child who’s been caught stealing. “I mistook it for my personal email,” he insists in a small voice. I wonder if I’m going to see a grown man cry today.
Luka continues with a disapproving sneer. “As it stands, the firewall I’ve built has isolated the virus, but not for long. From what I can tell, it’s ransomware. It has approximately 30% of our clients’ data locked away.”
My heart twists in my chest. It might not sound like a lot, but to a company like CyberFort, that’s a massive breach. I suddenly understand everyone’s urgency. If word gets out that CyberFort, one of the world’s leading cybersecurity companies got hacked themselves… the company could lose millions. Mikhail might lose a ton of clients. It’d ruin his company’s reputation. Who wants to work with a cybersecurity team that can’t even keep themselves secure?
“Have you been contacted by the person who sent the ransom?” I ask in a loud, clear voice.
Luka shakes his head. “Not yet, though I suspect we’ll be hearing from them shortly. I have to assume they’re waiting to break through the rest of the firewall to claim more data before giving us a ransom amount.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” I ask, already moving toward my workstation. “We need to isolate the virus and delete it before it can corrupt any more of our servers.”
“We’re trying,” Timothy says, joining me at the table. “But it looks like the virus has locked us out of the system, too. They were counting on our inability to act for the virus to spread.”
I shake my head, quickly prying open my laptop. I try logging in with my password, but I get an error message. I try again, but the same thing happens. He’s right. We’ve been locked out of our own system. There’s no telling how long Luka’s firewall—as expertly crafted as it may be—will last.
“There’s always another way in,” I mutter to myself. “We just have to think outside the box.”
Mikhail approaches, pulling up a chair next to me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Ransomware viruses are relatively simple,” I rattle off. I know he knows this, but right now verbal vomit is the only way I can concentrate. “Buck clicking that link—”
“Hey!” he interjects.
“Oh, shut up,” Luka snaps. “We all know it was you.”
Mikhail puts up a finger, silencing everyone. His eyes are trained on me, focused. “Go on, Aurora.”
“Clicking the link allowed the sender a window into our system through Buck’s profile. I wouldn’t be surprised if the person duplicated his ID in order to access the files they wanted. Now that they’re inside our system, they’ve probably set it so that anyone with CyberFort profiles has been flagged, and therefore restricted access. They’re using your own firewall against you.”
“You’re sure?” he asks me.
“I wrote a couple of ransomware virus codes in college. You know, for fun. Anything outside of infiltrate, copy, and lockout gets really confusing.”
