Down His World

Chapter Sixteen: What If She's 'Not' There?

Ky could not have been happier to hear Mavis's sudden answer. He stands up and takes her hand as he guides her to look out at the view of the sunset beyond the city. Ky gently positions himself to stand behind her as he embraces her tightly in a hug from behind while Mavis puts both her hands on his.

"I like the perfume you're wearing," he tells her.

"I wore this scent today just for you..." she blushes, happy that Ky noticed.

"I love you Ky," she says in a sweet and soft tone.

"I love you more," Ky replies with that smile that Mavis loved seeing so much.

Mavis went home that night to her apartment and couldn't believe that she was Ky's girlfriend now. Immediately, she whipped out her phone and added a red heart next to his name on his contact information. Even though it seemed childish, Mavis was really happy to see it.

Ky had told her that he'd be busy tomorrow as the staff members involved in the UniVerse project launch would be working at the office to ensure that everything would go smoothly on Monday. Mavis understood that Ky was a busy person and she wished him all the best for his work launch.

When Ky arrived at the office on Sunday afternoon, Jax and the team members involved in the launch were already there. "Ky! Thank goodness, you're here." Jax came running towards him.

"Why, what's wrong?" Ky answered.

"I called you but you didn't answer," Jax said as Ky quickly whipped out his phone.

"Sorry, I silenced it yesterday and forgot to turn it back on," Ky explains before switching on the ringer button on his phone.

"We've hit a crisis while Wilson was testing the server load. We're not sure why but the operations team reported a massive spike in the server resource utilization. How can that be? We aren't even live yet!" Jax explained in a panic as Ky quickly rushed to where the team was gathered.

"Oh, Mr Elias. You're finally here. We can't access anything. Do you think it's a hardware failure?" Mr Wilson suggested.

"It could also be a DDoS attack. We need to be careful." Jax said.

Ky did not say anything and began to think things through. Both were possible possibilities but what he was looking at on the electronic monitors did not seem as simple as that.

"Mr Wilson, I need to you analyze the incoming traffic patterns and ask your team to help check on the server logs for me," Ky said sternly as he sat down in front of the monitor and started to go through the codebase. Jax watched closely from behind him and whispered to Ky.

"Do you think it's Andrew?"

"It's possible, we can't be certain until we find out," Ky whispered back as he went back to focusing on reviewing the codes, line by line. That's when he saw it, sitting amongst the script was a subtle but devastating cross-site scripting flaw.

"How could I have overlooked this?" Ky started to beat himself up.

Everyone started to gather around him.

"This one mistake creates a vulnerability for an intruder to inject malicious scripting into our application's interface. That was the reason that the server was projecting an overload." Ky explains as everyone looks at each other in shock.

The launch was tomorrow at 6 am and they were running out of time. Ky ordered an emergency patch as he instructed Mr Wilson and his security team to fortify the server and deploy a Content Security Policy to mitigate the cross-site scripting risk temporarily. The rest of the team rushed to abandon the server that had been compromised and rerouted the testing traffic to the backup data centres that the company owned.