Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 160 - 160 80 sneak in

160: 80 sneak in 160: 80 sneak in “What’s the hardest cyber attack to defend against?

It’s when you walk into the target’s office, find a terminal in use, find an excuse to send its operator away, then plug a USB drive into the computer and proceed with authorized operations.

Unless the other party is willing to decrease work efficiency, every step requires identity verification.

Otherwise, no security system can withstand such an approach.”

“Other hacking methods are just inferior substitutes that arise because one cannot perform such direct actions for various reasons.”

These were words someone once said to Xiang Shan in the past.

In some sense, the bureaucratic system, often criticized as ‘inefficient’ due to its multilayered authorization protocol, is essentially this approach’s baseline.

Within the organization, every step of any operation requires specialized authorization and verification to ensure there are no deviations in conduct.

However, the result is a massive waste of human and material resources on repeated information verification.

Individual capabilities are reduced to an extreme level, where there is no difference between a genius and a fool on many positions.

When such “inefficiency” and “collective incompetence” spread to the levels of “information input” and execution, the bureaucratic group reaches the end of its life—then gets replaced by a new bureaucracy.

And if a computer required a password and a captcha input at each step—even just to refresh a webpage—the user experience would plunge below freezing point.

After all, tools are meant to be used by humans.

To be used, they must have an operational ‘window.’

Security technology is merely about layering this ‘window.’

But it can never completely eliminate this ‘window.’

Remote attacks make the system ‘think’ the operator is sitting in front of the ‘window.’

As long as one is physically ‘sitting’ opposite that ‘window,’ everything changes.

Even if it involves some operations that the system does not allow, the experience of ‘external’ versus ‘internal’ is starkly different.

At this moment, Xiang Shan stood ‘inside.’

He had bypassed the numerous soldiers preventing physical access to the ‘window.’ He connected to the internal signal of the building.

It was the Order of Knights’ system designed for building management.

The management of the Order of Knights surely hoped to control the building’s systems remotely at any moment—after all, everyone had network cards plugged into their brains, so there was no need to sit stiffly at the control panel.

Xiang Shan was essentially sitting in front of a terminal that was actively running.

With each breath, his Inner Strength passed through the service ports for knight apprentices and visitors, swiftly elevating his permissions.

“It’s a bit troublesome,” Xiang Shan thought.

“Each block has its independent backup power that isn’t controlled by a smart system but is purely mechanical.

If the voltage in a block suddenly goes out, it automatically kicks in to supply power…”

—which meant he couldn’t plunge the area into chaos by blowing up the energy system…

Xiang Shan pondered this.

The things he could do were ultimately limited.

The system at this Order of Knights’ headquarters wasn’t like those crude systems at the Great Stockade; the security measures were still quite substantial.

Xiang Shan wasn’t sure if the ancient viruses he remembered could still evade the ever-evolving virus libraries.

Perhaps he truly knew a few ancient viruses that the security systems couldn’t quickly annihilate, but he didn’t know specifically which ones.

If he rashly released Gu, and it was simply eliminated, he would just alert the enemy.

Moreover, there might still be some valuable intelligence inside the Order of Knights, which should not be casually destroyed with Gu Poison.

Xiang Shan merely followed the ancient backdoors, buried under layers of later codes, continuously extracting privileges that were not originally his.

—it wasn’t time to destroy yet.

Xiang Shan hummed a tuneless melody as he reminded himself of this.

If Xiang Shan could be physically in front of the main server of the Order of Knights’ building, then the operations he could perform would be much more.

But one didn’t need a Biological Brain to know that area was always heavily guarded, being the most fortified section of the building, and not easily breached.

This room was the cleaning room Deborah snuck into to clean her Prosthetic Body.

The small space was just over two meters high, covering a bit more than a square meter in floor area.

All four walls would spray massive amounts of cleaning agent to eliminate odors from the sewers while ensuring that potential microorganisms in the wastewater wouldn’t contaminate the Meiyimei Building environment.

Miss Deborah was still an apprentice after all, sometimes tasked with the sacred duty of raising rats.

If she carried odors, germs, or harmful substances, she could not work.

Exiting this cleaning room led to a corridor on the ground floor of the Meiyimei Building.

It was very quiet here, with basically no one returning—except occasionally Deborah, who used this secret path to go out.

Xiang Shan suddenly sighed.

A memory unconsciously surfaced.

It must have been from Deborah and Carolina.

Although Carolina was a servant, emotionally, she was the person closest to Deborah.

Other relatives weren’t like this servant, accompanying Deborah all the time.

Carolina, merely a servant, didn’t understand the grand principles of the Order of Knights, but she cared about its regulations more than Deborah herself.

Before each outing, the servant would remind Deborah, “Miss, you should ask the Vice Captain Lord for a good direction,” and “Miss, it’s time to start your thesis,” and so on…

Suddenly snapping out of his reverie, Xiang Shan wielded the Sword of Wisdom to cut through distracting thoughts.

“Side effects, huh.

I’m like this…

no wonder the Green Forest is all so mad,” Xiang Shan shook his head, “That said, this Miss Zhao could have just been a normal person, why choose otherwise?”

He didn’t dwell on these emotions but instead, guided by the memories of Deborah and Carolina, continued onwards.

After walking up ten floors, a patrol of soldiers approached from the corridor.

Xiang Shan pressed himself against the wall, avoiding the soldiers as they passed by, seemingly not seeing him.

These cyber guards, before starting their shifts, had turned off their prosthetic body’s visual capabilities and were only connected to the building’s surveillance cameras.

Some basic Inner Strength meditation techniques made their self-consciousness even more detached than regular Martial Artists, and “self-awareness” even included the “building” itself.

This made them more proactive in “protecting the building” than regular Martial Artists.

However, if one could hijack the camera’s signals or create a blind spot in its surveillance, deceiving these warriors would be no problem.

Their own prosthetic bodies essentially lacked independent vision.

Of course, not all the building’s guards were like this.

There were also ordinary soldiers with independent vision, or mercenaries not networked with the building and possessing stronger individual combat abilities, as well as AI weapons equipped only with biological brain plugins.

A combination of various technological methods ensured that no one could conquer the entire building with just a single tactic.

Xiang Shan kept moving forward.

Soon, he stopped in front of an elevator, but instead of setting it to stop, he stood by the door quietly waiting.

Minutes later, the elevator stopped at Xiang Shan’s floor.

The moment the elevator doors began to open slightly, Xiang Shan raised two long maces and thrust them fiercely inside.

“What…”

The Knight apprentice, yet to react, was struck on the forehead.

The severe concussion shattered the thoughts in his biological brain, and the stored electric charge instantly released metal, destroying the electronic devices in his brain.

The two Knight apprentices didn’t even know what had happened.

From their perspective, the moment the elevator doors opened slightly, a dark shadow stabbed inside.

Meanwhile, on the surveillance footage, the two Knight apprentices appeared engrossed in conversation, failing to exit the elevator in time.

Having accessed the elevator’s surveillance footage, Xiang Shan knew their positions and seized the perfect moment to attack.

The Hero stepped into the elevator and took advantage of the quick reboot of the prosthetic system and the biological brain’s temporary failure to catch up due to the concussion.

He quickly hacked into the two prosthetics, popped out the control system, and swiftly rewrote it.

He regained control of the two apprentices’ permissions.

The elevator ascended over a hundred floors.

The two Knight apprentices walked out just like that.

Another Knight apprentice waiting for the elevator gave Xiang Shan a curious glance.

This kind of cloak common among Jianghu people was occasionally used by Knights too, but mostly in scenarios like Yangtze Knight Daijiu Tai’a, where field investigations were necessary.

The new Knight apprentice couldn’t help but ask Xiang Shan, “Are you…

sent out to collect biological samples?”

He had no idea that an enemy could so easily infiltrate here without triggering an alarm.

Moreover, he didn’t notice anything amiss with the two chatty Knight apprentices, just thinking, “Since no one has attacked in such a confined space, they must not be enemies.”

Xiang Shan ambiguously nodded, giving a “rather not say” appearance.

“Indeed.

What kind of valuable biological samples could there be in such a tiny place?

Even if it’s a small amount of microbes, it’s hardly likely they could mutate to do anything fancy.”

“The genetic information of microbes can be transferred horizontally…” Xiang Shan casually replied.

“Heh,” the apprentice said, “You should avoid people like Lord Luo…

Ah!

Don’t go spreading that around, okay?”

Xiang Shan nodded, then searched the database for information related to “Lord Luo.”

Thus, he assumed a rough identity.

As someone “born in the Old Era,” Xiang Shan was quite familiar with the subjects that interested the Research Dogs before the “reforms.”

Thus, “an apprentice under Lord Luo” and this chance-met Knight apprentice hit it off well in conversation.

A few more people got on the elevator.

But no one thought the cloaked figure was out of place anymore.