Inside Borsch’s cybersecurity control room, things were usually quiet and under control, just the soft hum of server fans and the occasional clack of a keyboard. But that calm shattered in an instant that morning.
One of the operators, a glasses-wearing guy in a hoodie that read "Trust No Packet," suddenly froze at his screen.
“Guys... we just got a weird ping on port 8081,” he said, trying to keep it together even though his hands were shaking. The fact that someone had just cracked their security this easily, this early in the morning, sent a chill down his spine.
Elena Morozov, the head of cybersecurity, jumped up from her chair and strode over. “Pull up the traffic log,” she ordered.
She squinted at the fast-scrolling lines of raw data flashing across the screen, like living code.
