A Hacker’s Nightmare (630 words)

Okay. The prompt was “No one escapes the wild hunt.” Go ahead and join the fun at https://moreoddsthanends.home.blog/ 

And a session of free writing, with a little cleanup editing afterwards, came up with this. What do you think?

A Hacker’s Nightmare (630 words)

By Mike Barker

It happened again the other night. Our servers were humming in the back room, the air conditioning keeping everything cool, but someone opened up a virtual conduit using the best of hacking protocols and cheerfully copied practically a whole database of users’ info from our systems.

But this time, I was ready for it. I had the trackers already primed and running, and they responded with automated vigor, setting their hooks into the data stream and following it as the whole monstrous mess bounced out into the Internet, flickering between nodes, carefully redirecting and erasing its path as it went.

So this morning, the trackers, those faithful hounds, called in and let me know where they had ended up. It was a small server farm, not all that far away, although when they listed the places they had visited, it was like a trip around the virtual world, hitting servers and clients and even some old-fashioned data mirrors. I certainly hadn’t expected them to have to do all that, but their programming ensured that they would not let go until they found the final spot where that data went.

That’s when I put on the virtual reality goggles, gloves, and all the rest of my paraphernalia, and stepped into their midst. I had to tug at the strap of the goggles, it liked to catch on my ears. Then the hounds showed me the data, and we carefully corrupted it, ensuring that the hackers wouldn’t get any benefit from their attempt at our servers. After that, we started going through what they had on their servers. It was quickly obvious that they had been collecting data from other places, so we turned those files and databases into hexadecimal traps, just waiting for someone to open them to spew their viral loads into whatever clients and tools were used to crack them open. Truly hexed!

Next we took a quick look at the data feeds reaching out of this place. We set our own escape route aside for now, but the others were turned into one-way routes into the digital dumps, so that the next time someone tried to use any of those routes to access something outside this data center, they would be surprised at just how much sheer destruction they would set off. All of their own systems would end up destroyed, after a suitably random period of spitting trash and porn out of every display, printer, or other output device that was hooked up. With our motto as a banner, of course.

When we had boobytrapped every part of their systems that we could, from the high level data and programs all the way down to the boot programs, we left our calling card, a simple message containing a plain text copy of our motto that would be used as a printing banner when the traps went off, and carefully erased every other bit of evidence that we had been there. As we left, I set the last traps on the last clean data bus in the whole system, so they had no safe way to do anything.

The hounds were happy to resume their normal patrols in our data center, checking the data feeds and all the rest of it. I took a moment to stretch, still wearing all the VR interfaces, and joined with them in a moment of baying at the virtual moon, high above our running grounds. Then we yelled our motto at the shimmering sky, and it echoed across the bitstreams and screens.

“No one, nor zero, not one bit, escapes the Wild Hunt!”

Times may have changed, but we elves still know how to get things done. Where did you think all those cookies in your browsers came from?

And you thought Spock was just a Vulcan? Fascinating!

The end