Chapter 33
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The plan to trap Damian Croft required absolute precision and an uncomfortable amount of risk. But before they could even set the bait, Croft launched his first offensive strike against the foundation.
It happened at 2:00 PM on a Thursday. Emily was sitting in her office, drafting a physical affidavit for Chloe, when the lights above her suddenly flickered and died. A second later, the backup emergency lights kicked on, bathing the room in a dull, yellowish glow.
Rachel burst into the office, completely out of breath.
"It’s not a standard power outage, Emily," Rachel gasped, holding a walkie-talkie. "The IT department just rushed up from the basement. Our internal servers have been hit with a massive, coordinated Distributed Denial of Service attack. Someone is aggressively trying to breach our firewalls from the outside."
"Croft," Emily realized instantly, her blood running cold. "He figured out she is here. He’s trying to hack our database to find her room number and her case files."
"It gets worse," Nathan said, jogging into the office with his cell phone pressed to his ear. "He isn't just attacking the servers. He hijacked the foundation’s main phone lines. Every time someone calls the survivor hotline, they are being automatically redirected to a dial tone. He is trying to isolate us from the outside world."
The sheer arrogance of the attack was staggering. Croft was using military-grade cyber warfare tactics against a domestic violence shelter just to terrorize his wife.
"Did he breach the secure data?" Emily asked Rachel, her voice remarkably steady despite the chaos.
"No," Rachel smiled fiercely. "Because we took your advice. I physically unplugged the primary servers this morning. He is attacking a ghost network. There is absolutely no data for him to steal. Chloe's files are sitting in a locked metal filing cabinet in the basement."
"Good," Emily breathed a sigh of relief. "Nathan, call your contacts at the FBI cyber-crimes division. Tell them we are actively under a massive cyberattack from a domestic source. We have the IP logs hitting our firewall."
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"He’s using proxy servers, Emily," Nathan warned. "The FBI won't be able to trace this directly back to Omni-Tech. He is too smart to leave a direct footprint."
"I don't need the FBI to arrest him today," Emily said, her eyes blazing with absolute determination. "I need them to open an active file. I need them watching our network when we finally give him the bait. Tell them to start monitoring the traffic. Croft thinks he is a god behind a keyboard, but he is just a bully. And bullies always overplay their hand."
