True Love Waits

"I can make this thing hack-proof. I wrote a batch file that runs all these little programs. They do things like erasing your web history, identifying keyloggers, disabling 'Run as Administrator' vulnerabilities, removing malware and adware that your antivirus missed, and give you real-time protection. Rootkits, viruses, worms, spyware, adware, trojans all of that will be a thing of the past. It even detects weird network activity and throws the hacker into a virtual sandbox. He may think he's doing something, but it's all fake. I also got ahold of something called HIPS which does a lot of the heavy lifting."

"It can catch hacker attacks?" asked Evelyn.

"Of course. As well as everything else I mentioned. The main problem for a lot of these more traditional antivirus programs is that the virus is constantly changing. But heuristic analysis as well as the virtual sandbox and network monitoring takes care of all that. HIPS is a lifesaver."

"Where did you get that?"

"I... it doesn't matter. Grab a shower first. I'll help you install it." He saw the leery look on her face. "You don't want me to see what's on your computer? You hiding something?" He was teasing her on purpose. Evelyn shook her head. After a while, she went to fetch the laptop. "Be careful. I got a virus pretty quick. There's a lot of important stuff on there."

Sheffield nodded and took out an item from his pocket. It looked like a USB flash drive, but that wasn't quite what it was. It had a small box at the end of it. He plugged it into one of the USB slots, and it lit up. Despite her confusion, Evelyn left for the bathroom.

The moment he opened Evelyn's laptop, he felt something was wrong. He tried to call her over, but to his surprise, she was already in the bathroom. He used some of his tools to go snooping and found someone had already hacked in.

The hacker was good. He left few traces. Evelyn wouldn't have even known the guy was there.

But Sheffield knew what was going on as he ran his batch file. Someone had made an incoming connection, and that wasn't in her trusted connections list.

He opened his portable drive and brought out an app to do Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), and in particular, Encrypted Traffic Intelligence. That would do the busy work, and separate connections into different categories he could even find someone using a VPN. He also threw up a stealth app to mask his own activity, in case the hacker decided to come after him directly.

When Evelyn emerged from the bathroom, he asked, "Who used your computer today?"

Evelyn walked over and answered, "No one. I've been keeping it at home all the time. What's wrong?" His words made her nervous, because that computer was too important to be compromised. "Your computer was hacked before I installed that security suite. Someone has hacked into your encrypted data."

him and asked, "How do

he used too much jargon she might not understand. Then he explained it briefly. "I simply looked at the most recent files and who accessed them. It wasn't you." "No

they must cloned an authorized account so the computer thought it was you. The data was decrypted, and they had a look at the files." Unable to stay calm anymore, she told him, "I'm going to bid using those files in a few days. If the files are stolen and released in advance, it'll hurt ZL Group a lot." The loss of money didn't matter. The thing was, hundreds of employees had been working overtime for hundreds of nights for this

and said, "What's done is done. Let's try

Evelyn couldn't keep her

he said decisively, "I'm installing everything on your computer now. Meanwhile, you can release the bid earlier than them or work up a new one. That way your efforts won't be in vain and

install the

bang out another in one or two nights. Even if we release

"What's the bid for?"

wasn't planning to tell him, but since he asked, after taking a look at him, she finally chose to tell him the truth. "An online game. Our company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the weapon

designs? What did you spend more on?

a serious matter. 'Maybe I should get ahold of Dad,' she

the designer first. Convince him to announce he has a

designer holds the copyright, I'm not sure if

know!" It was true. Someone else was in charge of the contracts. She

he put a hand

Being a doctor is what you should focus on. Business is

Figure it out! Your business depends

her crazy. "I'm worried and in a bad mood. Let's