Chapter 2: Five SecondsThe Family's Biggest Mistake

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."