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Chapter 3 - Vous aimez les chats?

I got out of the shower freshened up and ready to take on anyone’s challenge, which was good because when I checked my mail I had a list of ten or so challenges, though some were far too easy, and others were just plain stupid. There were also three emails trying to sell me Viagra. Seriously, no matter what I do, somehow those emails always manage to get through.

After looking through each challenge individually I found the one that seemed like the most worthy and sat down to read through it again. So... kick4$$187 wants me to hack into some girl’s hard drive to delete an “incriminating message”. I need to do it before she gets home, in half an hour, and apparently she is the daughter of the French Ambassador so security is pretty tight. Not the toughest of challenges, I’ll admit, but it has some good potential for some fun and mischief. I love teasing the French.

Time to get to work. Okay, what do I have to work with here: I have kick4$$187’s email address, and I know he emailed the French ambassador’s daughter. Not much to work on but I guess a good place to start would be to access this guy’s email account. I ran a quick program that tries common passwords and word combinations, producing his password: password. Okay, that was way too easy for someone calling this a challenge, but I quickly saw why. Apart from the email to me, the account was blank, no emails in the inbox, sent items or junk folder.

Fine then, I’ll just do a check for this email address across common sites... Bingo, he’s using it as his secondary email for Facebook, the primary being: sovietpwnage@hotmail.com. This just keeps getting better, not only do I get to mess with the French ambassador, but this guy is Russian. Russians are cool, provided they aren’t drunk and in possession of a knife/heavy explosive.

Right, now to hack the correct email account, I thought to myself. I ran the program again and this time I got a much more “normal” password, so I could tell I was on the right track. A quick rifling through his recent emails provided me with the email in question, and I could see why he wanted it gone, it was really cheesy and just... ew.

Just as I was about to start hacking into the girl’s email account, I spotted a reply to that soppy email sat at the top of the page, surprisingly marked read. Looking into it a bit more, I saw that they’d been having conversations via email, which was strange, I thought this guy was just some stalker. I read through the emails, and suddenly realised why SovietPwnage wanted those messages gone: The French ambassador was quite a controlling father, and regularly gets people to check her computer for him, to ensure her “safety”. They were having a secret relationship, and didn’t want her dad to find out, so I had to clean up his mess?

I got to work quickly, because I didn’t have much time left until the inspection, and I wanted to be out of there before it started....

*Meanwhile*

“Sir, that infamous hacker you’ve had your eye on has recently asked to be challenged. I think this is just the opportunity we’ve been looking for, if you’ll forgive my optimism, Sir.”

“Yes Jenna, I think you may be right.” The mysterious figure said to his secretary, who was busy bustling around the room filing important paperwork.

“What do you want to do now then sir?”

“...Let’s start with Plan A, shall we?”

“A logical place to begin sir,” Jenna said jokingly, “I’ll have the item dispatched and placed where he’ll find it.”

“Good. One more thing?”

“What is it sir?”

“Make sure the park is bustling again, we don’t want him getting diverted.”

*Mike’s Room*

After a few tense minutes I had control of her account, so I sent a virus via email attachment from SovietPwnage, to give me direct control over her PC, because it turned out she’d been saving some of the messages (and the, quite frankly, disturbing attachments) to her hard drive, for safe keeping I suppose. Firstly, I rushed through her email account and removed all the incriminating messages from her inbox and placed them in an invisible, password protected, and encrypted folder. I then searched her hard drive for the “evidence”, and did the same to it to hide it from view.

Then I started on the fun part, after all, I still had 15 minutes to kill before inspection, and a nice big flashy decoy is a good distraction from hidden files. I quickly wrote a nice little program that creates a popup every time you click the mouse or press a key on the keyboard. Now what should I put in the popup window, I wondered. A quick Google search revealed to me that the ambassador was not a fan of cats, in the slightest. Using a translator I translated the message “I love cats.” Into all the main languages, and configured my popups to display one at random.

I placed my little program deep inside the OS coding so it was unlikely to be rooted out with ease, especially not before it deleted itself and all traces of its presence half an hour after it was activated. Then I closed everything I had opened, deleted my virus and backed out of the system. Once I had logged out of his email, I sent SovietPwnage a message telling him what I had done, and how he should message his beloved from now on, to avoid detection.

Just as I was about to sit back and relax, I had one last idea to taunt the ambassador. I opened up my random email account generator, and sent him an anonymous email:

“Vous aimez les chats?”

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Sorry this took so long to upload, I finished this chapter a while ago, but because of exams and other life-things I completely forgot that I finished it.

Hope you enjoyed this chapter, from what I remember I thought it was a good one :D

Comment on any mistakes, grammatical errors, plot holes etc. I'll love you for it :)