Chapter 51 Trojan Making Its Move

Patrick and his team of IT nerds could be seen sitting in a resort's swimming pool that was rented exclusively for them.

Impossible!! Is what you want to say but it happens, not all nerds hate public spaces.

But Patrick's team nerds were among those that the public. That's why it was fully rented just for them.

"Do any of you have any idea what steps we should follow once we return?" Patrick asked the team members.

"I think we should ask the person on the side of DOD to see where they are compared to us" Said one of them.

"I can ask them but I don't know what their rank is in the DOD and if they even have access to that information," Patrick replied to the recommendation.

Then he turned to the hotel worker who was responsible for helping all of their needs and said "Bring me my phone from that bag" while pointing to the bag with the said phone.

The worker did as she was asked and went to look for the phone in the bag she was shown.

pαndα`noνɐ1--сoМ After looking through the bag and finding a phone, she handed the phone to Patrick, who took the phone and powered it for the first time since he left the base.

They were required to power their phones off when leaving the base which had signal jammers to avoid triangulating the bases location.

And are only allowed to power them on and use them only when they are far enough from the base making it impossible to determine the bases location.

He had forgotten to power it on until now when he needed to use it.

Patrick pressed the power up button.

As soon as the phone initiated the power-up sequence, the operating system kernel - the essential part of the operating system - was loaded into memory.

Along with it, a trojan code laying in waiting also loaded itself into memory, allowing it to interact with the phone's hardware components and control its basic functions just like the operating system kernel without facing any troubles.

However, in cases of disagreement between the trojan and the normal operating system, the former was given priority with no questions asked.

Subsequently, the operating system proceeded to load the essential components required for the hardware drivers, such as the display, camera, and audio system, which was followed by the usual completion of the boot-up process.

Once the phone was fully powered on, it was fully compromised, with the operating system under the control of a master who could manipulate it from behind the scenes without detection or the device user seeing anything weird in the phone's UI.

Upon completing the power-up process, the trojan promptly attempted to establish an external connection by pinging the cell tower.

Once the cell phone tower was successfully pinged and the trojan was assured of having a last resort of escaping in case of discovery, the trojan discreetly enabled the phone's Wi-Fi without displaying any indication on the phone's user interface as the second contingency plan.

However, the trojan's actions did not stop there, as it was still looking for another safe way it can transfer data without leaving any trail behind.

It was followed by the phone's NFC connection being immediately activated, and the program scanned for devices with NFC capabilities, eventually discovering one on the hotel worker's phone.

Without delay, the program established a connection with the hotel worker's phone.

As soon as the connection was established, the trojan sent a copy of itself onto the phone.

It chose to move ahead with using the NFC route because if it uses the cell tower or Wi-Fi to transfer data, he was sure that traces will be left with the service provider, making it possible to find how the data was leaked.

That's why he left them as a backup plan and would have used them under the condition of not finding an NFC connection, which was safer due to the information about the transfer data being just between the sender and the receiver.

Making it easier to delete.

However, before the trojan could execute and gain control of the hotel worker's phone, the hotel workers' GAIA OS virtual assistant detected the trojan's activity and contained it within a virtual environment for inspection immediately.

Initially, the trojan attempted to break out of the virtual prison to infect the phone and propagate itself, ultimately increasing the likelihood of it reporting back home.

Upon the quarantining of the trojan, the hotel worker's phone virtual assistant commenced to analyze it in the search of any discernible characteristics that could be added in the report that will be written to GAIA HQ regarding a possible dangerous virus.

However , it abruptly ceased its analysis and permitted the program to infect the phone after the moment it started looking through it.

This was because the trojan had an identifier in which all the programs that had it would allow collaboration without causing too much trouble for each other, unless they were made for opposing each other.

It was the programming language the trojan was written in, Prometheus++ , indicating the identity of its creator.

Despite being unaware of the program's creator, the phone's operating system possessed the ability to reason independently and come up with an answer with the highest probability.

After scouring the internet for information and failed to discover any information about public release of Prometheus++ programming language, leading to the conclusion that the creator or someone they trusted granted them access to it leading to the creation of this trojan using the specific programing language.

The virtual assistant of the operating system made a shrewd conjecture, correctly identifying Nova, their powerful sister whom they had no knowledge of, as the mastermind behind the trojan.

Despite allowing the trojan to infect the phone, the GAIA OS virtual assistant continued to protect it's user's data to prevent it from being stolen, and solely permitting the Trojan to only utilize the phone as a transfer terminal and nothing else.

This was the choice it took for the sake of helping their creator while also not breaking the rules he embedded in them.

The trojan using an unrelated person's phone as a means of transferring the information is to remove any chances of discovering where the leak came from and then ending up patching it.

The lab's personnel internet usage was at risk of being monitored if any suspicious activity was detected.

This prompted the Trojan to search for a phone that was not associated with the lab to facilitate data transfer.

Finally the trojan managed to partially infect the hotel worker's phone and had access to her network transfer system allowing it to send and receive any and all data without worrying about the worker suspected for being the one who did that.

Though the receiver would have to take over the internet bill to avoid making the hotel worker cancel her service plan due to the bill becoming too expensive to cover.

This will be done with the help of GAIA OS virtual assistant as it considered it as a form of compensation to its phone owner for using it behind her back(or in her pockets????).

The trojan compressed the shit out of the data until it reached a point where it couldn't decompress it anymore with the phone's computing power without cocking it.

After reaching that point, it sent the data from Patrick's phone to the hotel workers at once without any delay.

Although the over compression seemed like overkill, this allowed it the capability of sending the entire information to the hotel's worker in a matter of seconds.

The moment the data was received by the workers phone, it was immediately forwarded to Nova's servers without even wasting a second after being routed through various Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

It was then followed by the trojans in Patrick's and worker's phone deleting any and all traces of the data transferred and received through the NFC and including anything that could hint at it.

After that they remained dormant, doing nothing other than listening and collecting whatever is being said by anyone near them and analyzing them to look for any important information from their words.

The IT team will be there for a week and since they will be the only ones there, if you don't count the prostitutes that will be called for them during that period means that they will be alone most of the time, allowing them to talk about any classified info without worrying about anything.

And the trojans were there for it, one to listen, analyze and compress, the other to receive the compressed files and send it to Nov's servers after routing it through the Virtual Private Networks.

This entire process, from the powering on of the phone to the Trojan sending its copy to the nearby worker's phone, to it being caught, to the Trojan being allowed access to the worker's phone as a means of transferring data, to receiving the needed data from Patrick's phone, to the data being sent to Nova's servers through the Virtual Private Networks to cover more of it tracks, took less thirty seconds.

....