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 you know someone

simply looked at the most recent files and who accessed them. It wasn't you." "No way! No one

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

"What's done is done.

couldn't keep her composure

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

to install the software

in advance. And we can't bang out another in one or two nights. Even if we release it now, our business partner won't be able to finish the designs in such a short time. So that

"What's the bid for?"

chose to tell him the truth. "An online game. Our company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the weapon designs. Character clothing and tools

What did you spend more on? Clothing

was a serious matter. 'Maybe I should

to stop her. "Contact the designer first. Convince him to announce he has a deal with ZL Group. Do it now! We have to take

Evelyn said, "Yeah, but it's not that easy. The designer is pretty mysterious, keeping everything hush-hush. Although the designer holds the copyright, I'm

was true. Someone else was in charge of the contracts.

he put a hand over it. Heedless of her impatience, Sheffield said firmly, "Contact

you please stop thinking about the weapon designs? I need to call Dad now. Being a doctor is what you

some calls. Figure it out!

"I'm worried and in a bad mood. Let's not fight, please. Maybe you