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I thought we were starting something.
Wrong again.
After swinging by my office to grab my laptop, I hustle into Tomer’s lair. He’s staring at his screen while tugging at the roots of his short blond hair with both hands.
Oh shit. The typically unflappable, emotionless guy is at the end of his fraying rope.
“Talk to me, T. What do you need?”
He rolls his shoulders and gives his head a shake like he’s batting away the stress. “We’re fucked.”
Sliding into my chair, I roll up beside him at his large desk. “What happened?”
He groans and drags his mouse across the screen. “All morning, my system has been glitchy.”
“Same. I noticed but figured you were doing some debugging.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he seethes.
“That doesn’t sound too good.”
He growls. “It gets worse.”
My stomach bottoms out. If Tomer’s reaction is anything to go by, then we are truly fucked. “What else do you know, buddy?”
“I launched Big Brother and saw this.” He taps his fingertip on his primary screen, which is open to the server monitoring program he designed.
A big red blob is flashing on the middle of the screen— in the shape of a bird finger.
Someone is digitally flipping us off.
This day is getting better by the minute. Is it too late to go home and pretend I overslept?
Three hours later, we’ve sealed off the path the hacker took to get inside the Redleg network, but we’re still searching for any signs of damage they did after infiltrating the system.
So far, we haven’t found a thing.
Aside from the flashing red bird finger that’s mocking us.
“It doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Tomer mutters.
He’s said the same thing about seventy-seven times thus far, and he’s right.
Not a single file is corrupted. There’s no sign of compromised client information. No bugs left behind. No viruses implanted. No large waves of data pulled from our system. And no incoming heaps of garbage to hide anything malicious.
Nothing.
Whatever they did, they simply got in, looked around, and left the little bird finger so we knew they’d been inside the network.
From what we can tell, the server is running slowly because of something hidden in that red bird finger. But Tomer can’t crack it, and I’m no help there. This type of thing is his specialty, not mine.
I’m more of the tech supply guy; the one you call when you need fancy toys to make the job easier out in the field. Sure, the toys I find and test out have technical components that need some know-how with software and hardware, but nothing like what Tomer’s dealing with. I can help with digging through the internet for research too. But the true technical hacker shit is out of my wheelhouse. Everything I know about coding and the real IT component of this job is what he’s taught me.
For the first time, I think Boss was right not to give me the promotion.
And speaking of him, he said he’d head down here once he finished his meeting. That was hours ago. What the fuck is he doing that’s more important than our network vulnerability?
We need to show him what we’re dealing with. If he hasn’t come to us, then I’ll go to him.
