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

guys had used to create those IDs, we could blast all of them off the network in one swift stroke.

“All of our verified users for this run have logins that start with DECS followed by unique hashes,” the orc hit man said through a jaw clenched so tight I was amazed his teeth hadn’t ground themselves to dust. “The hash list will take us longer to extract, but that is in process.”

“Thank you,” I said in a tone laced with enough sugary sarcasm to cause diabetes.

It only took me a minute or two to hack together a friend-or-foe script to identify the bad guys and terminate their processes. I double-checked my code to make sure I wasn’t about to bounce a bunch of billionaires off their private MMO server and then launched phase one of my counterattack.

I opened a second terminal window while my script ran in the main screen. Dozens of user names scrolled up the screen with a bright red word after each of them: TERMINATED.

“I just kicked a few hundred rogue users out of your system,” I informed the orc-faced freaks scattered around the room. “Which means whatever scrapyard firewall you had in place has already shit the bed and gone off to the happy hacking grounds. You guys probably should’ve hired me before your frenemies played hide the sausage with your fancy network’s balloon knot.”

None of the hit men responded to my status report. They looked bored, as if waiting to shoot me was the simplest job they’d ever had. Maybe it was. Half the orc boys looked like they’d been kicked through a meat grinder and had come out ready for another fight.

My script kept on playing whack-a-mole with the intruders. Every few hundredths of a second it checked who was online, and any name that didn’t match the safe list I’d established got its ticket punched with extreme prejudice. My trick burnt up valuable processing cycles, but it gave the network a little breathing room. I checked the diagram that had been opened for me and saw my maneuver had already relieved some of the network’s congestion.

That was good, but it wouldn’t last. These hackers were determined, and I needed to track them back to their source and clip their wings for good. If I didn’t, they’d figure out what I was up to and nullify my makeshift defenses with some new shenanigans.

My phone vibrated around my wrist, and I bumped it against the desk to kill the alarm before any of the orc thugs freaked out. The pattern it had throbbed against my skin told me that my tools package had finished part of its work and had some juicy information for me.

I punched in a command on the DECS terminal to check my private message system and saw two notes parked in my personal email box. The first one was the list of IP addresses and countries of origin from the traffic logs I’d beamed out for analysis. I took a quick peek at the results, and what I saw turned my smile upside down.

The data my analysis tools had parsed didn’t make any fucking sense. There were too many digits in every address segment, and where there should’ve been the names of foreign countries, the AI had spit out long strings of nonsense characters.

“All right, these bad boys were smart enough to cover their tracks and spoof their IP addresses,” I said to the room. “If your boss has any idea who might be behind this or where they’re sending the attack from, now would be a good time to get straight with me. It will be a whole hell of a lot easier if I know where to look for these assholes.”

While the leader of the orc kidnapping ring mumbled into his phone, I checked the second message through the terminal. This was a list of unique usernames and my AI’s best guess at the randomized patterns their attack used. I gave it a quick command to search for any of those user IDs in the usual places and hoped it might come up with a hit. Some hacker groups were stupid and liked to hide cute little signatures in their work.

Don’t do that, kids. That’s how you go to jail.

I was surprised to find that the list of usernames was short. There were a few dozen different handles, less than that if you cut off the alphanumeric strings that seemed to have been appended to them at random. If the attack had truly been brute force, there should’ve been thousands of those bogus login attempts.

Weird.

But even weirder were the strings of names that I could actually read.

Kezakazek||Drow||Sorcerer||????

Ristle||Gnome||Cleric||####

Sheth||Norisk||Warrior||####

Peska||Half-Demon||Rogue||####

“Cute,” I said sarcastically. “Maybe it is just script kiddies. The list of usernames in here looks like somebody’s D&D game spurted all over the place.”

I read off a few of the names to the orcs and asked, “Do any of those handles ring a bell for you boys?”

It was a long shot, but it certainly would’ve been nice if those names had been the aliases of the cartel’s most hated foes. Then Orc Boy Joe and the Gun Bunnies could’ve scampered off to solve the problem with bullets, and I could go home and get some damned rest.

After I collected my cool billion for helping them settle their shit.

“Checking,” the hit man said. “And the boss says we have too many enemies to count. This could be coming from anywhere.”

“Super,” I said with the same kind of fake good humor you get from the kid at Mickey D’s when you ask for a plain cheeseburger and fresh fries with no salt. “How long do I have left on my clock?”

“Twenty-five minutes,” the orc leader grunted. “Less talking. More work.”

“Fuck off,” I muttered and turned my attention back to the monitors.

The bad guys had been smart enough to hide their IP addresses, so a direct attack was out of the question for the moment. It was time for a different approach.

No one had