It was irrational, but Gregor was beginning to feel threatened by Nigel. In truth, Nigel reminded Gregor of himself ten years prior. Alexei had hand-picked Gregor from a recruiting event in Eastern Europe.

After some preliminary research and database manipulation, Gregor was able to locate the HR database that contained basic employee information. From there, he loaded his exploit program called Datasploit and looked for the exploit module needed to successfully access the database.

Five minutes later, Gregor was able to gain access to Nigel’s file. After a preliminary scan, he noticed Nigel was interestingly from the same American town that contained the bank he recently hacked.

Gregor clicked on the “Metadata” tab. After a few seconds, several groups of text blocks were visible on the screen. One heading read “VPN,” another “HomeNet.” Other blocks were labeled “CoffeeNet,” “AirNet,” and “GameNet.” Gregor clicked on the HomeNet grouping, and each of the blocks expanded into an interconnected network. Each block was connected by keywords in a block called a primary key.

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Several pieces of information appeared once Gregor clicked on the HomeNet image. One block was labeled “pictures,” another called “code”; however, one block that particularly caught his eye was labeled “known associates.” Immediately, four other blocks appeared, each with a name. Each of the names had one or more other blocks, depending on the level of interaction. He noticed blocks labeled “Jet” and “Milo” had dozens of other blocks clustered below them, while blocks labeled “Ellen” and “Henry” had only a few.

Gregor clicked on the Jet link and the screen filled with text blocks, some with pictures, others with audio links. Just as Gregor was about to click on one of the groupings of pictures, a system message appeared over Gregor’s screen: “HR member access imminent, initiating read-only mode.”

“This is not good,” Gregor said to himself. He launched a cleanup script, a precaution to help mask his actions. Since most actions on a system made changes to several files simultaneously, Gregor wanted to prevent logging anything on the system he was accessing with any identifiable system information from Gregor’s laptop.