Free Web NovelChapter 105: Chapter 100: I’ll Trust You One More Time!
"Safety Information is Zhou Ming?"
Staring at the name on the screen, Zhao Yi pursed his lips.
This name had left an impression on him.
After he finished making the Rubik’s Cube Calculator, he put the download link in the group chat. Not long after, he noticed a comment in the group discussion: ’Safety Information is Zhou Ming’ was one of them.
While everyone else was discussing the effects of the Rubik’s Cube Calculator and the possible secrets of the algorithms within, Zhou Ming was a bit of an outlier. He kept complaining to everyone in the group, ’The design for the webpage’s recharge and password unlock portal is too simple. I’m just unable to hack into it.’
At that point, Zhao Yi had wanted to retort, "I’m sorry alright! For not letting you hack in..."
This guy is definitely not normal.
Zhao Yi clicked on ’Security Information is Zhou Ming’s’ profile and found a short introduction: Cyber and Information Security Center.
"Cyber and Information Security Center?"
"A national department, right?"
Zhao Yi thought for a moment before responding, "Which group? Add me in." He decided to check it out.
"Add me as a friend first."
Zhou Ming sent him a friend request. Once he accepted, an invitation to join the group arrived, along with a message, "Change your group nickname when you join, don’t use your real name, use a codename."
"Sure."
Zhao Yi clicked to accept the invitation.
The group’s name was ’Red Heart Alliance Group 1’. It was a large group with a capacity of 200 members. When Zhao Yi joined, the group was at max capacity, meaning someone would have to leave to make room for others.
Zhao Yi quickly changed his group nickname to ’Eagle’. Upon closer inspection, he saw that his name had a prefix added to it, ’[Invited]’, so his group name read ’[Invited]Eagle’.
The group name prefix must have been added by Zhou Ming, who was the group admin of Red Heart Alliance. His nickname was ’[Red Heart A]Brother Ming’.
"What a pretentious name..."
Zhao Yi muttered to himself, shaking his head. He started scanning the group chat information. The group announcement was rather interesting: ’This group is for hackers to exchange technical know-how. Please respect the laws and regulations.’
The nicknames of the group members all contained ’[Red Heart]’. The names ranged from ’[Red Heart Two]’ to ’[Red Heart A]’. There were also a few, like his, who had the ’[Invited]’ prefix.
Soon enough,
people in the group started talking.
"Another invited member, another legend!"
"If Brother Ming invited him in, then he must be a legend. Legend, please enlighten us!"
"Legend, say something~"
"Each invited legend comes with a poker face!"
A flood of messages came in.
Zhao Yi just observed silently, while flipping through shared group files. The shared files in the group were fascinating, containing a lot of knowledge about hacking and intrusion, while some members shared simple detection and auxiliary software.
After having a closer look, he found nothing of strong relevance.
Although he had not seriously studied hacking technologies, every programmer harbors the ambition of being a hacker at some point. He had basic understanding. Hacking is a profession with a low barrier to entry, but there was a severe disparity in technical skills. The truly skilled hackers were computer experts and high-level programmers. The top-tier hacking knowledge and intrusion methods were surely related to computer knowledge. But the so-called ’hacker techniques’ shared in the group were just a few simple software applications and some operations for website intrusion or launching Trojans. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
The issue was...
Intruding a website only guides basic operations; the ’Trojan’ in ’Launching a Trojan’ was the key.
The chat conversation in the group was ongoing, with most people commenting being of ’[Red Heart Ten]’ or below. "I bought 200 Penguin accounts to test my luck. After several hours, only nine Penguin coins were drawn. What a loss! Twenty bucks gone!"
"You are so dumb to actually buy those!"
"What if I got lucky?"
"I set up an intercept on our home’s router, trying to find out if my sister has a boyfriend. But the intercepted Penguin messages are all gibberish, any experts here have a way to decode them?"
"No can do!"
"Look here, there’s a BBS website. We can easily log in with simple injections. Let’s hack it together?"
"Stop causing trouble!"
"It’s an edu-suffix forum!"
What kind of people are these? Buying Penguin accounts for sale online? Setting up router interceptions just to crack his sister’s Penguin messages? Summoning others to help hack into forum websites?
Are these people expected to launch a counter attack on overseas networks?
Zhao Yi suddenly felt skeptical. However, instead of directly leaving the group, he silently closed the group chat page, and set the notifications to ’Receive but don’t notify’.
It fell silent again.
Time to get to work.
He was nearly finished with the last part of his research paper. After a complete read-through to make minor corrections and fix small errors, it was pretty much ready for submission.
Zhao Yi had already chosen the journal to submit to: Journal of the ACM.
ACM, referred to the International Computer Association. Journal of the ACM was the official journal of the International Computer Association and had a high impact factor in the industry.
The Journal of the ACM mostly published pure theoretical content, such as algorithms, complexities, graph theory, combinatorial math etc. As for papers from other fields, getting published is almost impossible.
’Effective and Irrelevant Carry Filtering’ was an algorithm related to complexity and data mining. Because of the influence of the Rubik’s Cube Calculator, it had already garnered attention prior to its publication.
Professor Liu also thought it would be very appropriate to publish the paper in the Journal-of-the-ACM. He also knew one of the peer reviewers of Journal-of-the-ACM, saying that once Zhao Yi submitted his paper, he would let them know, so they could expedite the review and publication.
...
The next morning, there was a lot of buzz within the Zhengyang Police Department. Everyone was discussing the ’website eagle incident’.
It was bad enough that the police website had been hacked once, but even after improvements, it was hacked again just a day later. Those who knew the situation were jeering at the logistics department.
The higher-ups had ordered the police to upgrade their cybersecurity and even hired trusted computer experts to attack the police’s online networks and websites. ’Eagle’, recommended by Director Lin, had hacked into the website and the normal procedure was to report the problem, rectify and perfect it, which would essentially mean an upgrade.
And what happened?
The logistics department had forcefully suppressed the issue, meaning more or less, "We know the problem; there’s no need to report it."
This was outrageous.
If knowing about a loophole meant not reporting it, the computer expert hired wouldn’t get their due reward, let alone the fact that reputation was the key issue.
If the general public knew about this, who would want to help the police in the future?
Now, there was trouble.
The police website got hacked again, and once again the logistics department lost face. Director Zhou Hongwen of logistics felt so humiliated that he didn’t even dare leave his office. Over and over again, he was on the phone asking, "Has Li Jiandong arrived yet?"
"Send him here right away when he arrives!"
Perhaps because he hadn’t slept much the day before, Li Jiandong got up a bit late. He arrived at the office hardly on time and immediately sensed that something was off. People around were looking at him with a smirk.
One of the logistics colleagues pulled him aside and said, "The website got hacked again, and ’Eagle’ was behind it. Director Zhou is furious, you’d better rush over!"
Li Jiandong rushed to the director’s office at once.
"What happened!?"
Upon seeing Li Jiandong, Zhou Hongwen could no longer contain his rage, "Didn’t you say that you found the problem yesterday? How come there’s another issue today?"
Li Jiandong kept silent, bowing his head.
He was clueless too.
He knew the website’s admin entry point had been leaked, but he had already changed to a new password, which only he knew. How did the hacker get hold of the new password so fast?
Right!
The website’s admin entry point should be hidden!
Upon realizing this, Li Jiandong immediately said, "Director Zhou, I’ve got it. We should hide the admin entry point of the website. If the hacker doesn’t even know where the entry point is, they definitely won’t be able to hack in."
Zhou Hongwen waved him off.
The reason he was angry was not just because of the website getting hacked again. He was more upset because he had to take the blame for Li Jiandong and it made it difficult for him to back out after the website got hacked again.
He was the director, the leader!
He had just managed to suppress the issue yesterday. Should he start regretting and backing down just because the website got hacked again?
That was absolutely not acceptable!
For a moment, Zhou Hongwen didn’t know what to do. Should he continue to forcefully suppress the issue, or should he back down and let ’Eagle’, recommended by Lin Xudong, report the issue?
Going with the former was risky, while the latter would be a dent to his ego.
Zhou Hongwen stared intently at Li Jiandong, and asked, "Jiandong, I’ve always trusted you, trusted your skills and abilities. Now, I have one question for you. Are you sure that after changing whatever entry point, there’s no possible way for the hacker to infiltrate our website again?"
Li Jiandong knew this was a tipping point.
He gritted his teeth and nodded, "Director Zhou, there’s no problem. As long as the website’s admin page access point is hidden, the hacker can’t break in anymore. Look, the computer experts we hired also couldn’t do anything, right?"
Zhou Hongwen listened and nodded slightly.
True enough.
One of the computer experts, whom he had personally scouted, was an associate professor from the School of Information at Zhengyang University. The university was just a common undergraduate institute, but surely an associate professor from the School of Information must be very skilled.
They did not know who ’Eagle’ was, recommended by Lin Xudong. But Lin Xudong was a detective; how good a computer expert could he possibly know?
Definitely not better than an Associate Professor from Zhengyang University!
Zhou Hongwen took a deep breath and said sternly to Li Jiandong, "I’ll trust you one more time. If the website gets hacked again, regardless of the humiliation or anything else, we’ll have to follow the procedure."
"I reckon the higher-ups are likely aware of it already and have given me some face by not bringing it up. Do you understand?"
"My reputation is at stake here!"
Zhou Hongwen felt very depressed. He didn’t even know who ’Eagle’ was, yet he had lost a lot of face at the office due to website issues. No matter how he saw it, it just wasn’t worth it.
Li Jiandong quickly pledged an oath before rushing off to modify the code.
He originally thought it would be like yesterday—they just needed to overlay an image from the database. But it turned out that nothing happened when they tried overlaying the database. The images could only be unlocked with a password.
What now?
Were they really going to do the math problem?
Li Jiandong looked at the math problem, feeling slightly panicked. He screen-captured the problem and posted it to the logistics group chat. The resulting suggestions were exasperating, "Jiandong, why don’t you take the question to Zhengyang No.1 High School?"
"The Ninth Middle School nearby works too!"
"The Thirteenth Middle School isn’t bad either. My primary school classmate, Sun Zhiguo, his son is so good at studying—he was even shortlisted for a provincial math competition!"
"..."
