Chapter 110: Operation Aurora 2: A Trap

After everything that had gone on the past few weeks, this was the most relaxing time of Amelia’s work life.Their deal with OmniTech Corp that had brought a lot of unnecessary drama, at least in her opinion, had finally been completed and honestly, this was a decision the board hadn’t regretted, not one bit.

Since they had gotten it just a bit after signing the agreements, they had also gotten Sentinel a bit earlier than the rest of the world, perks of being OmniTech Corp’s partners.

And oh boy did the software deliver on its promises. She was right in trying to convince the board not to try copying the demo, since calling it a watered down version of this one would be an extreme understatement.

Unlike the demo, which only revealed a limited amount exploitation paths, the complete package showed them exactly how compromised their systems were.

One of these compromises was known as PROJECT AURORA.

------two days earlier-------


Amelia sat calmly in her home office carefully going through its features and findings.

She felt like a kid who had just gotten a new toy as she had been moving her mouse cursor and clicking on relevant tabs of Sentinel’s clean UI.

Amelia had been on it for so long that she hadn’t even realized that she hadn’t even slept the previous night and it was currently 3:53 AM.

The findings were categorized into high, medium and low threats making them easy to navigate and scan through.

Most of the threats found were either low or medium since Sentinel’s demo had already handled most.

These were just the ones that had been in their systems way before sentinel, things that their team had missed.

And since they were already in the systems before Sentinel, it couldn’t prevent them. But it could fix them pretty easily.

All Amelia needed to do was just click the fix button and all these exploit would be a thing of the past, and she was about to when she suddenly paused as she saw a file labeled critical.

According to OmniTech’s COO, Critical threats were threats that could affect every single part of their systems.

It could give admin authority to whoever planted it, and admin access to Google’s systems meant control over Gmail, Google maps, YouTube, Android and more importantly every single data of clients that were being hosted on their systems.

Her eyes narrowed as she hovered the cursor over the entry. Sentinel’s neat UI displayed the tag in sharp red text, pulsing slightly as if to emphasize its importance.

What caught her eyes next was the date that was displayed.

December, 2009!

Her eyes widened in shock as she realized what the date meant.

"What the hell?" Amelia muttered with the frown on her face.

This had been crawling in their systems from late last year? How the hell had her team missed this?

Where was all the genius they boasted of?

The more Sentinel discovered in their systems, the more disappointed in Google’s programming team she became.

This was the fourth zero day discovered in their systems now and they had completely missed it.

She clicked open the folder and the details unfolded before her eyes.

Entry Point: an advanced spear-phishing attack that had bypassed Google’s internal filters.

Payload: custom malware capable of escalating privileges, moving laterally, and exfiltrating sensitive data undetected.

Targets: Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists, alongside high-value corporate executives.

Amelia rubbed her temples in exhaustion. This was a f*cking free access key for whoever planted it to enter and leave as they pleased and Google would have no idea that they did.

That fifty million annual fee was looking a lot cheaper right now, especially compared to what she just discovered.

She was about to click the [Fix] button when she paused as an idea came to her, navigating Sentinel’s interface, she clicked on the support section and immediately started chat with the AI integrated within.

{Welcome to Sentinel’s AI assistant, what would you like help with today?}

The text appeared as soon as he opened the chat section and she started typing, "is there a way Sentinel can isolate a threat while letting the attacker still think they’re in the systems while I feed them information I want to?"

Athena almost rolled her ’eyes’ at the question, of course Ethan’s creations were far above what this timeline was capable of so how would it not be able to complete such a simple task?

Hell, they were not even using sixty percent of Sentinel’s capabilities and she was already acting like she had requested the impossible...Humans.

But she digressed, right now, she was only a simple AI chat assistant and she had to do the job assigned to her by Ethan, so she replied.

{Affirmative,} she started, {you could do this by clicking on the threat and instead of fix, you select isolate. This creates a simulated environment within the system architecture, redirecting the attacker’s requests through a controlled mirror. To the intruder, system responses will appear legitimate. In reality, all traffic is filtered, logged, and manipulated as desired.}

"Great," she muttered to herself as she exited the chat and went back to the threats tab.

Selecting the isolate option felt almost ceremonial. Amelia slid the cursor across the button and clicked. The critical threat dimmed for a second, then a thin yellow border appeared around it with a tiny spinner: CONTAINMENT: INITIALIZING.

The AI chat window popped back up before the status settled.

{Containment is active. The attacker’s session has been redirected to a mirrored environment. Network responses will be synthesized. You may now curate the decoy profile. Suggested templates: Internal R&D brief, executive credentials, archived email dumps, or research dossiers.}

Amelia thought about it for a while before muttering, "I have a better idea," with a grin.

Her goal was not just to stop the hack, but unmask who was behind it, since Elder wood as the file was named, has been notorious in the tech world for getting away with their hacks.

But their streak would stop here, and with sentinel, Amelia was determined to end it.

_________

Meanwhile, back in Beijing, China.

The roadside BBQ where the five previously sat had long since emptied; the five of them moved down an alley to a cramped van where the real work would happen.

When they reached the van, Elder wood was the one to open the back door, reveya line of laptops that hung on the Walls of it before they quickly walked in and closed the door behind them.

The van was a bit bigger than normal ones but with all the stuff within, it had become pretty cramped.

Each moved to their station, Mei and Aleks moved to a PC on the same side of the van while Zhou took the PC at the opposite end.

Lin just sat down the bean bag as his part of the job had been completed. He was more of a disguise man than a code guy.

So he would sit this one out.

Elder wood on the other hand stood in the van with his hands crossed as he monitored when they started work.

"Report your statues," he said.

Zhou, still jittery from his earlier drinks, read aloud the payloads they’d staged: "the door we opened is still there so access into their systems shouldn’t be that hard."

He paused for a short while before saying, "and we’re in."

Elder wood leaned forward and said. "Bring up the shared. I want to see what their servers look like now that Sentinel rolled out."

Lin sipped on a box of juice he had picked up in the Van’s fridge as he watched the four at work.

He would be totally lost trying to understand anything that was being said so he didn’t even bother trying.

Besides, this wasn’t even his specialty. His specialty was being a master of disguises. He was the man they sent if they wanted someone to be the man they sent if they wanted someone to look like someone else.

He could be a courier, a client officer, a tech rep — whatever the play required.

Mei tapped the screen. The shared folder bloomed into view. Files, doc names, build notes—rows and rows of potential leverage.

Aleks leaned over Mei’s shoulder. She’d opened a manifest that listed people: Gmail addresses, usernames tagged with activist groups, and beside each, corporate titles—CEO, Head of Patent, VP of Strategy. The list made the van colder.

"What did I tell you?" Mei murmured. "This is good. This pays." Her fingers quickly flew across the keyboard as she spoke.

But the nagging feeling that something was wrong still hadn’t gone away so Aleks remained skeptical even though the thrill of the hack was undeniable.

For the first time, he wanted them to wrap up this job quickly and get out of Google’s systems before anything went wrong.

What he didn’t know was that it was too late, every single information was currently being fed to them by none other than Athena as she used sentinel to track back to the attackers.

Before Elderwood would realize, it’d already be too late.