Novella One – 1

Anton looked up from his Rubik cube and stared blankly at the widest of the three monitors in front of him. This is the one monitor that Anton was quite pleased with. It was a decent size, 27″ Samsung LED that was always pointed to a page on his website. This page was one of many on Anton’s private website which was hosted on an AWS server halfway across the globe. A 32-character password was required to access the website. Once logged in, the multiple pages on the website provided a delightful aggregation of data points that Anton collected on different parts of the globe.

The page currently showing on Anton’s second monitor was a simple but quite powerful. The page showcased a global map detailing each country and the associated capital cities. Simple yes, but the magic happened behind the scenes, in the back-end DotNet code and SQL databases rather.

It had been a slow morning up until now. Typically, blue, green, and the occasional orange lights illuminated the different parts of this global map. What caught Anton’s attention was the brightest of them all, a single fiery-orange blinking light. While similar milder hues of this same light were blinking all over the map in different spots around the world, this particular one caught his attention as it was the brightest one in the East African region of the map. Anton zoomed into that section of the map, now revealing multiple blue lights and a single fiery-orange one in Kenya. As he zoomed in deeper into the central part of Kenya, Anton’s pulse quickened, well aware of the Tier 1 project that was active in that region. A fiery-orange blinker could only mean one thing, a high-value target system had been successfully penetrated.

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