The server in Lithuania was Ethan’s entry point—the weakest link in Cobalt’s chain. He executed a phishing campaign targeting the subsidiary’s employees, crafting emails so convincingly mundane that they would raise no alarms. Ethan’s plan was methodical. First, he dug into public records and company leaks, identifying a mid-level contractor who had worked with Cobalt Solutions a year earlier. The contractor’s credentials, unused for months, were still valid in some forgotten corner of Cobalt’s network. Impersonating this contractor, Ethan gained access to a lower-level employee’s email, a weak link in the chain. With this access Ethan spent considerable time reading through emails understanding how this person communicated, who they emailed regularly, and learned their writing style. To his surprise he discovered it was not at all uncommon for this employee to email Ethan’s target executive.

Using the compromised account, he crafted a spear-phishing email laced with a zero-day exploit, targeting the high-ranking executive. The email appeared to come from an internal department—urgent, innocuous, and believable. Within hours, Ethan’s target clicked the link, triggering Ethan’s custom exploit. The backdoor was now open.

Upon reading through his intendended target’s emails, he uncovered something. What he found was staggering: detailed plans for a coordinated attack involving drone swarms, targeting key cities along the Eastern seaboard. The drones were equipped with radio-frequency emitters capable of triggering hidden payloads—likely the nuclear devices Langston had warned him about.

Through his backdoor connection, Ethan probed the network cautiously, like a surgeon operating in a minefield. Cobalt’s mainframe was complex, with layers of firewalls and honeypots designed to trap intruders. But Ethan had anticipated this. His tools were tailored for such defenses, and bit by bit, he mapped the inner sanctum of their operations.

Ethan’s pulse quickened. He’d uncovered fragments of the plot, but the full picture was still elusive. Somewhere in Cobalt’s data, the exact locations of the devices were hidden—and he had to find them before it was too late.

[Index]

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