Chapter 12 - Root Access|
Daniel took a step back, his hand dropping away from his tactical belt. "Ethan... you know me. I’ve served your family for eight years. I took a bullet for you in New York."
"I know," I said quietly. "Which is why I need you to prove to me that your terminal wasn't compromised."
We went down to the basement server room—a cold, climate-controlled space filled with humming black server racks and blue LED indicators.
Daniel sat down at the master console, plugging in his hardware key and typing in his multi-factor credentials. Line after line of green text scrolled across the high-resolution monitors.
"Searching for root access overrides between yesterday morning and this evening," Daniel muttered, his fingers typing furiously.
A red warning box flashed on the central screen.
SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED: YESTERDAY 01:12 PM. USER: SYSTEM_ADMIN_OVERRIDE LOCATION: EXTERNAL ENCRYPTED IP (PROXY: MANHATTAN).
"Look at that," Daniel gasped, pointing to the code. "Someone didn't clone Rosa’s card from inside the house. They used a backdoor software patch installed into our security firmware three months ago! They spoofed her card data and pushed it through the main gate terminal remotely!"
"Who installed that firmware patch three months ago?" I demanded.
Daniel pulled up the maintenance history for the server hardware.
"It was an automatic system update," Daniel said, clicking through the log. "Pushed directly from our security vendor... Vance Global Security."
I let out a long, cold breath.
May you like
Vance Global Security. A subsidiary firm owned entirely by Victoria Vance’s hedge fund.
They hadn't just framed Rosa. They had owned our security system from the very beginning.
