Chapter 13 - Digital Intrusion
|
Ten minutes after hanging up with Celeste, I called Maya Lin, the lead cybersecurity specialist at my news network in Seattle.
Maya was a brilliant thirty-year-old former gray-hat hacker who had helped me break open the state treasury corruption story two years prior.
"Evan, it's midnight," Maya grogganed, her voice thick with sleep. "This better involve corporate treason."
"It involves a private security company hosting an illegal surveillance server in Denver," I said flatly. "I have the physical address, the IP block, and the master encryption key. I need you to breach it before they wipe the drives."
Maya’s tone shifted from annoyed to razor-sharp in two seconds. "Send me the data."
I forwarded Celeste's information to Maya’s encrypted workstation. For the next three hours, I sat in my kitchen, sipping cold coffee, watching a terminal screen as Maya bypassed firewalls, exploited outdated security protocols on Whitaker Strategic Risk’s private network, and executed a deep digital intrusion.
At 3:45 a.m., Maya’s face appeared on my video link. She looked visibly shaken.
"Evan," she whispered, staring at her monitor off-camera. "I got in. I bypassed their secondary encryption using that callsign."
"What did you find?"
Maya swallowed hard, wiping a tear from her cheek. "It's all here. Hundreds of hours of high-definition video logs from inside the house. I just pulled up the file from Christmas Eve."
May you like
"Did you secure the raw video files?" I asked, my voice barely audible.
"I mirrored the entire directory to a secure cloud server managed by our legal team," Maya said, her eyes flashing with anger. "Evan... this video will put your brother in federal prison for thirty years. No lawyer on earth can save him from what's on these tapes."
