Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

thought it necessary to give me the details on how DECS was set up or where I could find important pieces of information like the firewall configuration schema. Fortunately, I was really good at this. It only took me a couple of minutes to find the firewall and set up a blacklist based on the IP addresses my AI had extracted from the traffic logs.

The firewall was a piece of shit. That was obvious by the fact that it had failed so spectacularly. I didn’t trust that it wouldn’t fail again, but the blacklist I fed to it would make its job so simple even a one-armed monkey with a bad weed problem could handle it. All the software had to do was check the IP addresses against the list I’d given it, and when it found a match, it would deny them even a single attempt to log in.

While the firewall itself wasn’t worth a plugged nickel, there was one silver lining. The cartel’s otherwise incompetent IT boys had set up reciprocal blocking agreements with a few dozen firewalls owned by other companies in the same area. The IP addresses I’d added to the DECS blacklist would be shared with the next set of firewalls in this block of the internet neighborhood, and they’d share it with their partners, and so on, and so on. Before long, those masked IPs would be blocked by any system they tried to access.

A red border flashed around my primary terminal window, and I raised an eyebrow as I took in the status report from DECS. My script had killed most of the illegitimate user sessions, but they hadn’t been able to block them all. Kezakazek and her little pals were still loose in the system, and they were eating up bandwidth like nobody’s business. They were still digging in toward the core, but they were also transmitting an alarming amount of information back out of DECS.

What in the hell were they up to?

I hammered in a quick string of commands to terminate Kezakazek’s session, but nothing happened. The command didn’t kick back an error message or shoot me a status report. I wondered if my keyboard had become disconnected, but, no, I could see the command on the terminal. The system just hadn’t bothered to respond to me.

That was very, very bad.

“What are the odds you have a mole in here?” I asked. “Someone with elevated privileges like the ones on this terminal?”

“Not possible,” the orc said. “And we don’t know anyone by those names you gave us earlier. Keep working. You have twenty minutes.”

Fuck. This just kept getting worse.

If the intruders had already given themselves download privileges, they might have also made themselves immune to my systematic purge. I needed to figure out what they were up to before I could launch another counterattack.

I took a quick peek at their activity logs, and my heart sank. They’d yanked gigabytes of data out of the system and injected gigabytes more. I tapped into the Kezakazek stream, and a flood of hexadecimal garbage splashed across the terminal. I grabbed a couple of lines of the middle of the stream and bashed together a one-liner program to translate the gibberish into ASCII.

****Kezakazek|| Chill Touch|| Wahket Commoner||3||Wound

What in the actual fuck was that all about? It reminded me of the readouts from the old online role-playing games I used to play on my iPad before everything went to augmented reality. I translated a few more lines, and they were all variations on the same theme.

If a gamer clan had hacked their way into DECS as some sort of prank or a way to gain an edge in some online role-playing game, this whole job was about to get incredibly messy.

Because these cartel assholes didn’t care why their system was shitting the bed. They’d kill whoever was responsible for their problem, whether that was another criminal syndicate or a bunch of otherwise innocent kids. And, even if it were just a stupid prank, I was still a dead man if I didn’t solve the issue before the clock ran down.

I glanced over at the firewall configuration terminal screen and cursed when I saw the red border flashing around it. I pivoted my attention to the alert and bit back a shout of frustration.

The firewall had failed at the very simple job I’d given it. The masked IP addresses didn’t conform to the international standard, and the truly shitacular software the cartel had trusted to defend their system couldn’t handle any nonstandard inputs. The connection requests I’d counted on the firewall to deflect still battered the system, and DECS was getting closer to a catastrophic failure with every passing second.

Speaking of minutes, I had about fifteen of them left. Fifty percent of my work time had evaporated in what felt like thirty seconds. The shot clock had ticked down into the danger zone, and the time for playing defense was over. If I wanted to live, I had to get aggressive.

“All right, dickbags,” I whispered under my breath. “If I can’t keep you out, let’s see if I can get in.”

I switched back to my AI tool suite and commanded it to find the single most common IP address used by the attackers. It churned for a few seconds and then spat out three addresses that had each been used close to a million times.

“Here goes nothing.” I fired up some attack programs on my tools server and fed all three IP addresses into my attack.

Nothing happened for what felt like a few hours, and beads of sweat trickled down my spine as my nerves tried to push me into full-blown panic mode. There was every chance this wouldn’t work. But if it did...

***CONNECTING.

***CONNECTING..

***CONNECTING...

The inside of my lower lip was raw from where I’d anxiously gnawed on it. If I could catch one lousy break, I could wrap this fucking mess up and collect one billion goddamn dollars.

I checked the timestamp on my attack suite. Five seconds