Page 18 of My Secret Snowflake
Ernest looks at me. “I don’t really have time to read fiction at the moment. I didn’t realize you were a big reader.”
“I stopped reading fiction for a while, but my friend, Rupert, got me back into it. I guess it’s a good way to relax, kind of like a good hobby. Do you have any hobbies?” I’m proud of my segue.
Ernest looks at me like I’m a weirdo. I pull at my collar.
“No,” Ernest says. “What is this? Twenty questions?”
“I just realized we eat lunch together every day, and I still don’t know much about you.” I wince. That sounds ridiculous.
Ernest’s eyes widen. “And you want to know what my hobbies are?” He takes a sip of water.
“And your favorite cookies.”
Ernest chokes on his water. “My favorite cookies?”
I should flutter my eyelashes at him.
“For Lily’s cookie baking party. She wants to know everyone’s favorite cookies,” I say. “She also wants to know everyone’s hobbies and favorite movies, for possible gift exchanges.”
Ernest visibly recovers.
“Oh, for your friend Lily’s party. Anything with chocolate,” he says. “How was lunch with Iris? Why don’t you invite her to join us tomorrow for lunch so you can introduce me? I need to establish some sort of connection before I ask her out.”
“Don’t you need to see if you like her first before you ask her out?” My voice comes out a bit testy, but Ernest doesn’t seem to notice. “I’m out of the office tomorrow, unfortunately.” Or not. I shouldwantto set them up. It’s not like I want to date Iris.
“She’ll be at Rupert and Lily’s cookie party on Sunday, right? That’s better. More informal. Thanks again for inviting me,” Ernest says.
Lily asked me to invite good single guy friends. I don’t consider Ernest a friend, but when he asked me what I was doing this weekend, it felt weird not to invite him when he seemed lonely, especially since Lily had already given the greenlight. But now I’m not so sure Ernest is the good guy I thought he was. And Iris deserves a good guy.
Chapter five
Iris
Aredlightflasheson my screen.
Someone tripped two of my traps in our Alburquerque infrastructure—one trap that looks like the CEO’s files and one that looks like his assistant’s files. They’re decoys. A shiver goes through me.An intruder is—or was—in the network.And they’re after the CEO’s files.
I text Raphael and then try to figure out current status, but he’s fast. My chair jostles as he peers over my shoulder at my monitors.
“I think they’re out. But I can’t yet determine if they took anything,” I say. “I need to check if anything was caught or flagged by our monitoring software.” I click over to another screen to check our data loss prevention software.
A tall triangular spike.
“Unusual DNS requests,” Raphael says.
My fingers fly over the keyboard. Yup, a whole host of domain names we don’t know are trying to communicate with our network. A whole bunch of wolves in sheep’s clothing knocking at the door and pretending they’re here for tea. Not good. Not another attack in which they try to overwhelm our system by using multiple unknown domain name servers. I type a command. No time for tea today. It’s lucky I brought my lunch.
“I’ll tell Kevin. In the meantime, let’s follow our security breach protocol,” Raphael says.
I alert Ricardo, my IT colleague in New Mexico. It looks like the CEO’s files were targeted, but I’d already isolated that, requiring higher permissions to access. Ricardo notes that any presentations the CEO was working on were probably shared with others, like finance, in addition to his assistant. He mentioned that before, which is why I created a honeypot that looked like the assistant’s files. We need to figure out what the hacker took and eliminate their access point.
Raphael calls from the doorway of the bullpen, our fond name for the cybersecurity team room. “Kevin wants to talk to us. Can you come?”
“Ready.” I pick up my laptop and follow Raphael into Kevin’s office. Two whiteboards are clustered in the corner, but the dominant feature is all the computer monitors, one on Kevin’s desk and two on the work surface against the wall.
Kevin taps his fingers. He is a tall, stocky man, imposing, but older. Raphael always complains that Kevin has an IT background rather than cybersecurity, and he is too old-school, refusing to try new approaches. Xavier had colleagues who worked at a film company when it was hacked so completely that they had to shut down the system and work with paper, so he insisted on a cybersecurity team at Dream. That’s why five of us report to Kevin, who is dual Chief Information Officer/Chief Information Security Officer.
Raphael and I sit, and I connect my laptop to the screen.
