Untold Hacking Stories: the angry employee
Untold Hacking Stores is a series of fictional but real-world episodes of security threats and the human characters who exploit them. The main goal is to drive transformation security awareness so that we realize we don’t live in a Hollywood movie.
K. was not too comfortable at his desk chair. The afternoon was not being so nice to his nerves, the sun was not shining as it is supposed to be, and the coffee from the side-cornered kitchen was not so hot or strong enough.
He steadily tried to focus on his work at the screen — tons of small lines of illegible programming code. But the atmosphere of silence was periodically interrupted by heavy steps hitting the ground. The faces that passed by had some sadness or worry in their eyes. Faces that were not coming back to his workstations even after rounds in the clock.
Something was not sticking.
Soon the people around have begun to get distracted by notifications on their phones. Followed always and drastically by a deep sigh of relief or distress.
“What the heck is happening?”, K. questioned narrowly.
The doubt did not last long. K.’s phone trembled, and a message from the corporate chat service popped-up on the screen: “We have an important matter to inform you. Please, get up to the 13th floor — room 101 immediately”.
“Immediately?”, K. started to think about how strange that request was. Unless some company product incident had happened, there was no other plausible reason why the immediateness was required. Salary raises definitely don’t come in these ways.
* * *
“Come on, K. You know what’s going on here…You already saw this scene being played in your imagination times before; when your leader insisted on being a pain in the ass because he doesn’t even have a clue about the tech. But why now? Why you? The company does not seem to be having economic troubles. On the contrary, they’ve recently announced…”
K. felt a dose of adrenaline injected into his brain. A drop of sweat slept by his face and fell over the keyboard. K. knew he had a short time.
Quarters ago, he had been through some serious security holes over the product’s company. K. reported some of the problems at first, highlighting the importance of logging everything and keeping systems up to date. But they ignored the warnings. Something related to “this doesn’t add value to the company hyper-growth as our brand new features do” or “I know what you mean, kid, but this is already mapped risk on our infinite roadmap.”
“Yeah, thanks for nothing, guys!”, K. silently affirmed.
“Alright, K. Avoid looking at the side-cornered cameras. Reduce the monitor’s contrast to a blur. They should be revoking your access by now. But, hey, you’re still logged into the production server. The session longs last as 60 minutes.”, and he lowed down his head and stared at the clock. “Mark from the 3rd floor is OK; he had put some energy into protecting the product’s network. But he was the first to joke about my warnings in front of all the staff. Now it’s time to get through his weak firewall.”
From an outsider perspective, K. was merely finishing some usual business at his station. The black box window opened at his eyes, the cursor angrily blinking after each written down command entered.
“Now just run this code script to reversely connect with the remote server and…voilá. We have a secret connection tunnel right under their nose. Au revoir, Mark.”
K. took a deep breath, shut down his station, and moved his hand off the keyboard. “Just act normal.”, he finally thought.
As K. walked by the company’s hall towards the elevators, the walls fulfilled by photographs of supposedly happy and working-hard people, the fancy five stars hotel decoration with non-sense meaning, he could not think otherwise how hard they would be hit in the next few days.
* * *
As the night came, K. could not close his eyes with easy. “It’s too much data.”, he reflected. “There are even all the product services passwords exposed in the source code. All those finances, contracts, and clients’ details…how much crypto would this worth? Maybe I could do some research in the dark web market.”
But suddenly K. got confused. He had never crossed these lines before. He had spent some time hanging around the Internet corners in the early days. But that was just a bunch of computer systems hacked for fun, guided mainly by curiosity.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”, K. got up his bed and opened the laptop over the desk. “They called for it.”
* * *
K. got up earlier than usual that day. The morning announced itself to him with inquisitive weight. So the coffee from his kitchen to be so scorching and strong.
He took a seat in front of his laptop. The smell of the coffee penetrated his nose and kind of prepared his heart for the news. Although he already knew the headlines.
* * *
The character name K. is a humble reference to the great literary masterpieces written by Franz Kafka, the genius behind The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and other “must-see before you die” books, etc.
