Little Hacker

While Henry was out teaching Gwen drive, the little girl at home wasn't idle either.

After a year of wits and courage, Skye had given up on running away from home unless she was absolutely certain of success. Otherwise, every time she was caught and brought back, she would get a beating, and a delicate girl like her couldn't take it.

She's now very enthusiastic about surfing the internet, even doing some illegal things, such as hacking into other people's websites.

However, Skye wasn't trying to tamper with the content; she wanted to read articles that were only available to members or had access restrictions.

For non-essential goods, she has to work from home to earn pocket money and buy them herself. So why bother registering or paying for online resources?

This is also a lesson that netizens have taught her.

In the online world of this era, there was indeed little concept of users paying for content, and free resources that infringed on others' intellectual property rights were everywhere. However, the saying "free is the most expensive" also holds true in this era.

Skye has repeatedly thought she found free resources, only to discover that the compressed files contained various viruses and worms. Or, after registering with a website, her email inbox would be flooded with strange and unusual content.

Viruses that directly cripple a computer are of course a priority for removal. But other less obvious viruses and Trojan programs can consume computer resources.

For a girl who assembles her own computer from scrap metal, having even 1% of her resources is like a blood feud that killed her parents.

Although Skye didn't know who her biological parents were, her determination not to let others take advantage of her, even in the smallest way, led her to teach herself skills to fight against cyber Hacker. At the same time, she also developed some basic cybersecurity awareness.

It's often said that Hacker techniques aren't defensive skills; they're purely offensive. How could a child who learns these skills not try them out?

Hacking into the websites and internal networks of official government organizations is too risky. A kid from the sewers doesn't yet have the courage to challenge public authority. But the Dark Web, which is beginning to take shape in this era, has become Skye's playground for practice.

The Dark Web is not entirely a lawless zone; it is also an arena for gray hat Hacker to showcase their skills and compete against each other.

Skye honed and exchanged her skills in places like this. The only thing she probably didn't do was to reveal her target to everyone.

The reason for not doing so is certainly not to keep someone's secret, or because the goal is personal and they are unwilling to share it with others.

Skye discovered that once she made the Henry Network's path public, regardless of whether anyone could help her or teach her how to crack it, the entire firewall system and network path would be drastically changed the next day.

Whether the difficulty has increased is hard for her to judge given her skill level. But figuring out the entire internal network architecture will take her a lot of time, not to mention cracking it. That person isn't used to writing comments and explaining to everyone how he built it.

So Skye had to rely on herself.

However, if it were a time like today, Skye wouldn't need to use Hacker techniques to break into BB's system. Instead, she would sneak into the man's room while Henry was out and directly operate his computer!

Unlike Skye's own studio room, Henry's room was filled with bookshelves and piles of books, except for a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and a computer on the desk.

The charging system for the core robot BB was also in his room. According to Henry himself, BB's control system was on his computer. But no one could verify this... that guy was a habitual liar.

Skye turned on Henry's computer. The first mistake she made on this computer was assuming that the Windows system displayed on the screen was the main operating system he was using.

After painstakingly cracking the password, Skye happily caused all sorts of trouble inside, searching for any illicit files the other party had stored.

In the end, it was discovered that the seemingly clean operating system, which didn't even bother with junk files, was just a facade. In reality, she had been operating a virtual machine, a deceptive operating system.

Henry was using Linux, which forced Skye to relearn this operating system, which had a high learning curve.

Moreover, he wasn't using a common distribution, let alone a desktop version; he was using a text-based Linux distribution, which undoubtedly increased the learning difficulty.

Fortunately, there are many experts online willing to help, such as CK and TS. Miss_C is a great confidante; she doesn't teach IT skills, but she often gives very good advice and ideas.

Today, Skye logged in and got stuck on the first level again. She tried entering the password she had previously cracked, but of course, it didn't work. So she had to crack it again.

During the process, the resentful girl couldn't help but curse, "I told you not to change your password every day, sooner or later you'd forget it yourself and shut yourself out of your own computer!"

The fortunate thing is that without outside interference, Henry's system architecture won't change. So the method for finding a new password is the same as before; it just takes time.

To save time, Skye naturally kept refining her solution. This required a solid foundation in mathematics and programming languages. To this end, the girl taught herself a considerable amount of material beyond her syllabus.

Even after finally obtaining administrator privileges, don't assume you can do whatever you want within Henry's system.

As mentioned earlier, the Linux system Henry used was not a commercially available distribution, meaning that he could freely change the way he used commands, and even make some anti-human designs.

For example, typing "copy" actually deletes the computer; typing "dir" shuts down the computer.

Instead of obediently figuring out how to issue commands in Henry's self-torturing version of Linux, Skye, on Miss_C's advice, designed a miniature system to embed in Henry's computer, using his hard drive as an extended hard drive.

Having honed her Hacker skills for so long, Skye knew very well that minimizing her footprints, or remembering to delete content from her login files, was extremely important.

Partly because he hadn't completely cleared his tracks, Henry's computer system would be completely different the next time he returned. So shutting down and restarting was absolutely forbidden, Skye could only use hot-embedding to temporarily replace the system with his own.

A typical computer operating system couldn't do this, of course. But Henry's computer could use virtual hosting, and that was Skye's opportunity.

Once the homemade lightweight disc system was successfully embedded into Henry's operating system, Skye was finally able to peek into the computer's contents.

I checked the time; an hour had already passed.

Because she didn't know how long Henry planned to teach Gwen to drive, but Skye was certain the man would be back before dinner was ready, she didn't have much time left.

Skillfully mounting the hard drive, Skye began searching its contents.

Although the instructions of the Henry operating system are counterintuitive, the naming conventions for the files are not so strange.

After all, compared to the finite number of instructions, the number of files is theoretically unlimited. Therefore, meaningful filenames or those that follow certain rules can help with understanding.

Skye just needs to figure out Henry's habits. And that's Miss_C's advice.