Later that morning
Nigel was working in the office while Jet helped Melissa. He had been trying to decipher the fragments of code on his cellphone for hours.
“Back to help me?” Nigel said in a playful tone.
“I’ve been up to my elbows in blood, cleaning up after Brody’s attack,” Jet snapped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sorry for snapping. While you’ve been here, I’ve been helping Melissa with the cleanup. Aren’t you concerned about Brody?”
I don’t feel anything for that man. Besides, he’s with a doctor now—there’s not much I can do for him.
“When you’re ready, I’ll show you what I have so far.”
“Just give me a minute to clean up,” Jet said as she headed toward the bathroom.
Nigel downloaded the mysterious code from Melissa's phone first. It looked like a series of functions and methods from a popular programming language known as PSnake.
It’s almost as if the sender dumped an entire ProgHub repository and texted it to us. Is it related to Delta somehow? Nigel wondered.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Figure out the code yet?” Melissa asked.
“The code looks like it is part of a much larger program. There are different modules of it scattered about, so I need to examine everything before I can figure out the code’s purpose,” Nigel said.
“Like a puzzle?”
“Exactly like that. We just need to find the hooks that connect these pieces. For example,” Nigel pointed, “it looks like this part of the code is referencing contacting an external server—the IP address is not hard-coded, and there is no name resolution, which means something will need to update it via another mechanism. Such as passing a value via a variable,” Nigel explained.
“That’s not standard. Someone obviously wants to hide it, or the server’s name changes so often it needs to be a variable. Either way, that is suspicious,” Jet said.
“Yeah, or the function is getting updated by another module. We need more time to decipher this.”
“Can I have my phone back now?” Melissa asked.
“Oh, yes—I’ve already downloaded everything off of it, so here you go,” Nigel said, handing her the phone.
I need to check the ProgHub server. Perhaps there will be additional clues there.
Nigel checked an online scanner called ShowALLD, checking its database for a compromised ProgHub server. The scanner was useful for finding compromised sites because it routinely scanned every program on that server connected to the internet. It reported information about each scanner, and if it responded with information, it would log it. A lot of security researchers used the data to help companies close security holes. But the bad guys also used the service for malice.
“Judging from the preliminary ShowALLD scans, it looks like this code is linked to the code egress from the Edinburgh facility,” Nigel said.
“Could there be a message somewhere in this jumble of code and data?” Melissa asked.
“It’s possible, but I need more time to find it.”