The Family's Biggest Mistake

At 2:47 p.m., more than 300 red alerts flashed across the screens in Langford Group's financial control center. The money hadn't been stolen. It was way worse than that because no one in the entire company could use a single dollar. Five billion dollars in client assets were locked in clearing accounts. The phones wouldn't stop ringing as banks, investment firms, and federal regulators scrambled for answers. My father, Richard Langford, sat in the conference room, staring at an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. My cousin, Ryan Langford, was glued to the server status reports, his face growing paler by the minute. The cybersecurity team had spent hours sifting through every system log from the night before, trying to figure out how someone got in. Unfortunately, they couldn't find a thing. There were no firewall alerts, failed login attempts, or even a hint of suspicious activity. The monitoring system showed them that everything was running perfectly, and that's precisely what worried me. Three years ago, I'd watched another financial system go down in exactly the same way. I'd tried everything to save it, but I still failed. Now that I was given a second chance at life, I'd promised myself that I'd stay out of this. Right now, all I wanted was to keep my head down, avoid the family's business, and spend my days gaming in peace on the company headquarters' top floor. At least that was the plan. I couldn't stop myself from freezing like a deer in headlights the moment I glanced at the system architecture diagram. Because there it was. A tiny payment gateway was buried among dozens of connections. It was so insignificant that everyone else had overlooked it. I walked over and pointed at the screen. "You're all looking in the wrong place." Then, I tapped the payment gateway. "This is where they got in. Right here." Chapter 1 The Flaw Nobody Noticed When I pushed the conference room door open, I wasn't surprised to see everyone staring at the giant screen on the wall. The screen might as well be a sea of red. After all, the company's clearing accounts were frozen, which meant that transfer permissions were locked. As a result, client authorization requests were piling up by the second. My father, Richard Langford, sat at the head of the table with an unlit cigarette between his fingers. Usually, he would raise hell if anyone were to smoke in the conference room. Yet, today, he clearly had bigger things to worry about. "Who let you in?" My cousin, Ryan, was the first to notice me. He kept his voice low, almost as if my presence alone might somehow make the situation worse. "I was just passing by," I said lightly, setting the box of mechanical keyboard keycaps I'd been carrying beside the door. "I heard quite a commotion when I did." My father looked up, his brows furrowed. "This isn't one of your games, George." "I know." I glanced at the projection screen. "It sure doesn't look like you guys are having much fun." The room fell silent for a moment. Dylan Bowers, a cybersecurity consultant, slid a printed report across the table. "At 3:12 a.m. yesterday, someone exploited a flaw in our authorization system and changed the fund transfer rules." He tapped the report. "The problem is, there's no record of anyone logging in. Every server is running normally, network traffic looks clean, and all authentication checks are passing." Leon Hudson, the chief systems architect, was quick to interject, "George, this isn't some hacker movie. Permissions don't just change on their own. If someone altered them, there has to be evidence somewhere. We just haven't found it yet." Xavier Shannon, the federal regulatory representative, checked his watch before speaking, "You've already been given your final deadline. You have 24 hours to restore the system and submit a complete incident report." He turned toward my father. "If you fail, Langford Group's operating license will be suspended. The company will also be held responsible for the five billion dollars in affected client assets." Ryan swallowed hard and barely managed to say, "We still have time." "Having time doesn't mean you can sit around reassuring yourselves that everything will be fine," Xavier snapped in frustration. I'd long stopped paying attention to their argument by then. Instead, my eyes were glued to the system architecture diagram projected onto the wall. It displayed the company's firewalls, identity management servers, payment gateways, and fund transfer services in clear display. They were even linked in a complicated web of lines and boxes. Yet, it still took me less than ten seconds to spot something strange. It was located near the bottom of the diagram, a thin gray line representing the payment gateway's persistent connection channel. I pointed at it and asked, "Did anyone check this?" Leon followed my finger and frowned. "Of course. We've checked every interface." "How long does that connection stay open?" I questioned. "It follows the standard configuration." "Which is?" He hesitated for a moment before answering, "30 seconds." I raised an eyebrow. "You sure about that?" Dylan flipped through the documents in front of him. "The configuration logs do say 30 seconds." I couldn't help smiling. "Yes, but that's just what the logs say. It doesn't mean that's what's actually happening." My father's expression darkened. "George, enough. Stop wasting everyone's time." I ignored him and pointed at the gray line again. "Your authentication system revalidates access every 30 seconds, right? But the payment gateway allows existing connections to stay open." I turned toward Leon. "If those connections stay active longer than the authentication window, someone could swap out the request payload between security checks without triggering a new authentication request." Leon gave a dismissive laugh. "You've never even touched our codebase. What makes you think you've suddenly found a vulnerability that our entire team missed?" "Because it's right there," I retorted, but I didn't bother explaining further. Red warnings kept flashing one after another on the giant screen across the conference room. More requests had piled up with every passing second during our back-and-forth, adding pressure to everyone around the table. Dylan finally raised his head. "What exactly are you referring to?" I pointed at the payment gateway again. "The one thing nobody in this room thought to question." I paused and looked around the table, making sure everyone was paying attention. "If every security system is working perfectly, every login is legitimate, and every authentication check is passing..." I tapped the gray line on the screen. "Then, how the hell did someone steal your authority to move five billion dollars?" Chapter 2 Five Seconds Nobody answered my question. So, I lowered my hand and looked around the conference room. "Check the actual connection timeout instead of relying on what's written in the configuration file." My father rubbed his temples, clearly running out of patience with what he thought were my foolish antics. "That's enough, George. Go back upstairs." I stayed where I was and made no attempt to leave. Leon adjusted his glasses and leaned forward. "Since you're so confident, why don't you be a little more specific, George? Which interface are we talking about?" I looked straight at him and replied bluntly, "The payment gateway. Someone would only need five seconds to get in." The conference room fell silent as everyone turned to face me. Even Leon looked caught off guard, but he quickly recovered and tapped a finger against the table. "Do you even understand what you're implying?" he asked, his polite tone dropping entirely. "I understand perfectly." I walked over to the projection screen, picked up a laser pointer, and directed everyone's attention to the system architecture diagram. "Your security system rechecks authentication every 30 seconds, but the payment gateway keeps connections alive for 35 seconds." I circled the connection on the diagram and continued, "That leaves a five-second window where a hacker could turn a legitimate request into something completely different." Ryan immediately started flipping through the configuration reports. "Leon, is the gateway really set to 35 seconds?" "That's impossible," Leon replied so quickly that it almost sounded rehearsed. Dylan pulled up the live system console to check the connection settings himself. After a few seconds, his expression changed. "The active service is reporting 35 seconds," he said, staring at the screen in disbelief. For a moment, he looked just as shocked as everyone else. Leon quickly interrupted, "It could be a temporary testing parameter." "Who changed it?" I asked. "We're looking into that," he blurted. "When was it changed?" "We're checking that as well." I set the laser pointer down and looked at him. "You've been on this case for 48 hours, and nobody noticed those extra five seconds?" Dylan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "The connection logs haven't shown anything suspicious." "That's because the hacker never had to log in again," I explained. "All they had to do was wait for an authentication check to finish and swap the request while the connection was still active." Leon let out another dismissive scoff. "Come on, George. You don't even know how to code, and now, you're suddenly posing as a cybersecurity expert?" "I don't need to know how to write every line of code to understand what went wrong," I shot back. I met his eyes and continued, "When you've seen enough bodies, you learn to recognize what killed them." My words left an uncomfortable silence hanging over the room. Ryan leaned closer and gave my sleeve a gentle tug. "Hey, man. Maybe you should just head back upstairs." "Sure, I'll leave you guys to it." I put the laser pointer back where I'd found it and glanced at the reports scattered across the table. "Keep investigating, and when you come up empty… Well, I guess you can always stare at those logs some more." Dylan looked up at me, wholly irritated by my attitude. "George, have you been playing too many video games? Do you seriously think a system vulnerability works like some kind of cooldown timer?" I gave him a flat look. "You're checking login records, but I'm talking about connection states. Those are two completely different things." My father spoke before Dylan could respond. "George, go upstairs and get some rest. This is not the time to prove how smart you are." His voice was firm enough to make it clear that the discussion was over. I almost told him I had nothing to prove, but I kept my mouth shut. There was no point arguing when nobody was willing to listen. As far as my family was concerned, I was just a spoiled rich kid who hadn't set foot in a real office for three years. Yet, I'd walked into a conference room full of experts and started telling them their own system worked. Honestly, I could hardly blame them for thinking I was full of it. So, I turned around and walked out without another word. The elevator took me straight to the top floor, where I'd made myself a comfortable little escape from the rest of the company. The entire floor used to be for equipment storage, but I'd turned it into my personal gaming room. I had three monitors, a custom gaming desk, and a whole wall of mechanical keyboards, all set up just the way I liked. Everyone in the Langford family thought I'd wasted a perfectly good office space, but I couldn't have been happier with how it turned out. I felt like I could finally shut out everything happening downstairs as soon as the doors closed behind me. I dropped into my gaming chair and launched a match, hoping some game time would help me forget about the mess in the conference room. Unfortunately, a memory I'd buried deep in the crevices of my mind rushed forward before the loading screen even finished. I was forced to recall what had happened in my previous life, when the same financial system had suffered an attack almost identical to the one we were facing. Our access permissions had changed with no rhyme or reason. At the time, every security log looked perfectly normal no matter how carefully we examined it. Back then, an organization that would later become known as Black Tide had carried out the cyberattack. They didn't specialize in breaking through firewalls unlike ordinary hackers because that would've been far too obvious. Instead, they hid malicious changes in routine system updates, making everything look normal until the system gave them an opening to strike. They were patient enough to wait for the system to open the door rather than forcing their way in. Even now, I could still remember the fire that had ended my previous life. I remembered the unbearable heat, the thick smoke filling my lungs, and the final message that appeared on my monitor before everything went black. The message had simply read, "Attack complete." … My phone suddenly buzzed, pulling me out of the memory and back to reality. It was a message from Ryan, so I glanced at the screen to see what he wanted. "George, Dylan found a deleted activity log." I immediately sat up straight, wondering what they'd managed to uncover so quickly. Before I could even type a reply, another message appeared on my screen. "The source IP traces back to your development PC." Chapter 3 The Framed Suspect I stared at my phone, trying to process what Ryan had just told me. My game character stood motionless on my monitor, dumbly waiting for an enemy to finish him off. Someone had used my computer, or more accurately, someone had gone out of their way to make it look like I was responsible for the attack. I closed the game, grabbed my jacket, and headed straight for the elevator. This time, I was going back to the conference room because I wanted to, not because someone had called me down. … When I walked in, Dylan had already pulled up the activity logs on the giant screen. The records showed that at 2:58 a.m., a device identified as George Langford's Development PC, with the source IP address 192.168.50.123, had modified administrator-level access rules. Leon stood beside the screen, looking like a prosecutor who'd just found the evidence he needed to win. "Well, George, I guess I don't have to ask who's responsible anymore," he said, turning toward me with a smug expression. I ignored his tone and studied the IP address on the screen. "My development PC hasn't been turned on in three months." "That doesn't mean nobody accessed it remotely," Dylan replied, pointing at the device information. "The hardware ID, security chip signature, and browser fingerprint all match your machine. Someone would've needed your cooperation to replicate all three perfectly." Xavier closed the folder in front of him and turned toward my father. "If this turns out to be an inside job, we're looking at much more serious consequences. Mr. Langford, I recommend securing the device immediately and cooperating fully with the investigation." "That's fine by me, but I want to see the device first," I said. Leon chuckled as though I'd just made another ridiculous excuse. "What now? Are you going to tell us someone hacked into your computer?" I replied, "That's one possibility." Leon added, "Which would still prove the attack came from your device." "No, it would only prove that someone used my device's identity." Dylan frowned at my response. "That identity includes a unique hardware ID." "A hardware ID isn't the same as a fingerprint," I replied before turning to my father. "Mr. Langford, give me ten minutes." My father looked like he wanted to argue, but he held back for a moment. "What exactly are you planning to do?" "I'm bringing my development PC down here." "You want to do that right now?" "Yes, right now." He stared at me for several seconds, clearly weighing his options. Eventually, he turned toward Ryan and told him to come with me. My old tower PC sat on a shelf in the farthest corner of the underground parking garage, covered in a thick layer of dust. It had been exactly where I'd left it three months ago. Ryan picked up the tower PC while I gathered the cables. He was panting laboriously by the time we were halfway back. "George, is this thing really going to prove your innocence?" he asked between breaths. I shook my head. "Nope." He nearly stopped walking at my answer. "Then, why the hell are we hauling it all the way upstairs?" he demanded. "Because it might prove that someone tampered with it." Ryan looked like he wanted to whinge, but he kept walking. … Once we returned to the conference room, we connected the tower to a monitor and powered it on. The fans rumbled to life, and everyone watched as the computer slowly booted up. I opened the login history as soon as Windows finished loading. The others gathered around the monitor, eager to see what I would find. There was a record showing a Remote Desktop connection established at 2:57 a.m. the previous night, routed through an internal relay server. Dylan leaned closer to examine the record, and his expression immediately changed. "He's right. There was a remote login." Leon didn't hesitate to jump to conclusions. "So, someone used George's device to launch the attack." "You're still getting it wrong," I corrected. He frowned, clearly irritated by me constantly contradicting him. Then, he asked impatiently, "And how am I wrong this time?" "If my device had initiated the connection, it wouldn't have used this login method." I opened the network traffic logs and continued explaining, "Someone copied my device's identity onto another device." Leon folded his arms and shot me a skeptical look. "You can spin this however you want, George, but the data doesn't lie." I glanced at him and replied, "You'd be surprised how easily it can." I didn't bother wasting any more time arguing with him as I imported the previous day's captured network traffic into an analysis tool and filtered everything associated with the IP address 192.168.50.123. The traffic looked completely normal at first glance. The request structures, device identifiers, and connection routes all matched what everyone expected from my development PC. Everything matched, which explained why the investigation team had so quickly pointed the finger at me. I started expanding the packet fields one layer at a time, carefully examining details most people would overlook. Ryan leaned closer and squinted at the screen. "What exactly are we looking for?" I scrolled for another moment before stopping on a particular field. "Take a look at this." I highlighted a single number on the screen and pointed it out. "The TTL value is what matters here." Dylan leaned over my shoulder to see better. "What's wrong with it? It says 64." "Exactly," I replied, pointing toward the dusty tower sitting beside us. "That's the problem. My computer runs Windows, and Windows typically starts with a TTL of 128." I tapped the highlighted number on the screen. "But this traffic has a TTL of 64, which is a common starting value for Linux systems." Leon reached toward the table, but his hand suddenly stopped. I turned toward him and continued, "These packets didn't originate from my development PC. Someone used a Linux server to impersonate my machine." I looked back at the screen, where the supposedly matching device information was still displayed. "The IP address, hardware fingerprint, and browser information were all spoofed to make the traffic look like it came from my computer." Nobody said a word. The same people who had been so eager to accuse me just minutes earlier were now staring at the screen, trying to make sense of what I'd shown them. Xavier finally leaned forward, his expression growing solemn at the implications. "Can you prove that?" Chapter 4 The Insider I nodded confidently. "Absolutely." Then, I pulled up a set of legitimate login records and displayed them alongside the suspicious ones. Both sets showed the same hardware information, but their TTL values differed. "Whoever spoofed my device's identity forgot one important detail," I explained. "Network traffic leaves its own fingerprints, and those aren't always easy to fake." Dylan studied the screen, then looked at me. "So, you're saying that the attacker planted a man-in-the-middle server inside our network?" "Exactly." Ryan looked confused by the explanation. "But how did they get your device information in the first place?" I didn't answer him right away. Instead, I opened the company's code repository and searched for the device identification component. After I scrolled through the recent changes, I found a commit that immediately caught my attention. It had been submitted by Leon on 23rd September at 3:47 p.m., with a description that read, "Monitoring tool upgrade. Fixed memory leak." The atmosphere in the conference room changed as everyone noticed the name on the screen. Leon was quick to defend himself. "It's just a software component. There's nothing unusual about bringing in third-party libraries during an upgrade." "Then, I suppose there's nothing unusual about skipping the security review either?" I asked. I opened the commit details and showed everyone the unfamiliar module added to the existing monitoring software. Its description said the module was designed to automatically optimize device identification and reduce redundant authentication checks. It did sound like a routine performance improvement, which was probably why nobody questioned it. Dylan leaned closer to examine the code. The longer he studied it, the deeper his frown became. Finally, he said firmly, "I never approved this module." "The approval's in your email," Leon shot back. "But you're the one who merged it into production," I reminded him lightly. He opened his mouth as if to argue, but he fell silent. I opened a browser and searched for the component's name. There weren't many results, but I found a security report filed six months ago near the bottom of the page. The report described suspected collection and transmission of device fingerprints to overseas servers. However, the investigators closed the case because they couldn't reproduce the issue. I displayed the report on the giant screen so everyone could read it. Ryan went through the information twice before looking up at me. "So, you're telling me this thing was just sitting there, waiting for us to install an update?" he asked, his voice noticeably tense. "Pretty much," I replied, leaning against the table. "The hackers hid malicious code inside a component that looked completely legitimate. Then, they waited for companies to install it themselves." I pointed toward the module on the screen. "Once the software was up and running, it started collecting device information without anyone noticing. The hackers didn't have to break through your security systems because the company had already installed their code for them." I glanced around the conference room before adding, "Simply put, they didn't have to break down your front door because you handed them the keys." Dylan turned sharply toward Leon. "Why did you choose this component?" "I already told you," Leon replied defensively. "It was a mistake." "A mistake, huh? Then, let's look at something else," I said. I opened the building's security access records and searched through the entries from 24th September. One record showed Leon entered the core server room at 2:17 a.m. and stayed for 1 hour and 47 minutes. Ryan looked up from the screen, clearly surprised. "Leon, didn't you tell us you were home that night?" Leon's confident mask cracked for the first time since I'd barged into the conference room. "I went in to investigate some network latency," he replied lowly. "Was there a latency alert?" I pressed. "Not every internal investigation has to be triggered by an alert," he responded quickly. Dylan immediately pulled up that night's monitoring records and checked the system performance reports. "There's nothing here," he said after a moment. "No alerts, no performance issues, and certainly no indication that anything was wrong. Everything was operating normally." I turned back toward Leon. "So, do you mind telling us just what exactly you were investigating?" He didn't answer. I continued scrolling through the activity logs until I found another entry that caught my attention. At 2:41 a.m. on 24th September, someone had modified the payment gateway configuration, increasing the connection timeout from thirty seconds to thirty-five seconds. Leon's account was the one behind the change. Dylan stared at the record, his expression growing darker and darker by the second. "You're the one who added those five seconds?" "No!" Leon snapped, straightening in his chair. "Someone must have compromised my account." I almost laughed at how quickly he shifted to a different excuse. "That's funny because you just told everyone how impossible it was to clone a device's identity five minutes ago." I held his gaze. "But now it's suddenly possible for someone to impersonate you now that your name is showing up in the logs?" Leon slammed his fist against the table. "These are all coincidences!" "Then, I've got one more coincidence for you," I replied calmly. I took out my phone and opened a monitoring app I'd written three years ago. The program had quietly been recording metadata from unusual connections across the company's terminal ever since I installed it. I filtered the records to show activity around 3 a.m. the previous night. One connection stood out almost immediately. Leon's office computer had connected to an overseas server through port 8443 at 3:02 a.m. The destination used a .io domain, and the connection had remained active for 17 seconds. Ryan stared at the details on my phone before looking at me in confusion. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" "It looks like a connection to a command-and-control server," I explained. Then, I enlarged the connection details so everyone could see them more clearly. "That's the kind of server hackers use to communicate with machines they've compromised. They send instructions from one end, and the infected computers carry them out on the other." Ryan still looked a little confused, so I gave him a simpler example. "Think of it like a remote control and a toy car. The hacker holds the remote, and the compromised computer follows whatever instructions it receives." He slowly nodded as the explanation sank in. Leon, who was seated across the table, fidgeted in his chair. His face had gone pale, and the confidence he'd shown throughout the meeting was thoroughly gone. For the first time since I'd walked into that conference room, he looked genuinely afraid of what was coming.