Put Me To Work!

Act 3 Chapter 3

She’s outside, sitting on the same wooden bench as I did 2 years prior, with a laptop and a yellow chicken plush? I occasionally caught her talking to the chicken as if she’s explaining a problem with the laptop. I could hear her say something like,

“I hex-dumped a file. I found a suspicious ELF header hidden inside a PDF file.”

Could it be…

“I extracted it, got the ELF, disassemble it statically and dynamically already.”

No way…

“This sneaky fucking evil creature, I think it tries to throw me off guard. None of the machine instructions make any goddamn sense!”

“God, I feel stupid! I know there’s an APT laughing their ass off right looking at me trying to uncover what their malicious file just did. Why am I in cybersecurity, I should’ve picked up something else! My professors were right….”

Holy shit. I rushed outside, leaving everyone behind.

“If you see me talk to that chicken plush, no you don’t.” She said to me, though it was no use because I’ve seen it all in 4K.

I couldn’t hide my excitement but I think that got lost in translation and now she made this weird face. As if a stalker had just come to meet her. I’ve stalked her by the way. It’s impossible not to, because everyone in the family was constantly talking about her. Spilling tiny bits of information, one by one.

Lin, that’s your distant cousin, Fidelya. Don’t interact with her.

Whenever she’s near that means bad luck will follow. I think it’s because she was born 13 days after the 13th anniversary of the death of our Great Protector Saifudin The Wise.

I heard from the people in her hometown, whenever she came back there the city rained for weeks. I’ve never been there though but that would explain why it’s called the rainy city now.

Whatever you do, stay away from her. She’s a satanic! I saw her once with metallic horns and she always talk to animals. That’s probably why her parents divorced anyway.

There’s no explanation other than she’s a witch. I mean how can an orphan study engineering in one of the best institution in this country AND actually finish it?

Those are enough data points for me to figure her out. I started from just Duckduckgo-ing her given name. Unsurprisingly that returned nothing particularly interesting. I knew that she has graduated with a bachelor degree in engineering, from one of the best institution in this country. So I listed all public, private universities, polytechnics and vocational schools. I filtered to just give me the top 10 names based on something like university rank. My plan was to append her name with the university name to see if I could get some publications, news, or anything by the university about her. I was really lucky on this one because I checked on the public universities list first. There were false positives at first, but because I knew that she’s now working in cybersecurity she must’ve taken something like Information, Network, Computer, or Software Engineering. I eliminated lots of potential candidates this way. Then, I found someone has uploaded her bachelor thesis to one of those shady journal websites that require you to make an account to download the file. Got her full name that way.

I found a lot of her social media accounts from obtaining her full name. She hasn’t privated them back then (I bet now she already did). I went to Instagram first and saw that she was tagged by the student’s organization based in a particularly city. I researched that city and it has a reputation of raining real hard for weeks. That post also gave me her major and class, which put a rough estimate of her age. I also found her GitHub account, it aligned with all the information we got so far. One commit to a now archived repository stood out to me.

fix: centered a div. can’t believe i’m doing this on my bday fuck you [redacted client name for client’s safety]!

Got her birthday and judging from the comment she was born 13 days after the 13th anniversary of the death of our Great Protector Saifudin The Wise, I was able to determine her age with confidence. Ladies and gentlemen, meet my distant cousin:

Fidelya [last name, redacted for privacy reasons] 24, is an alumni of [university name, redacted for privacy reasons] University, majoring in Information Technology. Besides studying, she was an active member in some communities, such as the [community name, redacted for privacy reasons] chapter in her university. These experiences have improved her soft skills in addition to her academic performance graduating with [redacted because she doesn’t like boasting about her GPA] GPA [yes, this is a template]. Upon completion of her study, she works for a tech company based in [company location, redacted for privacy reasons] as a security analyst, focusing on digital forensics, threat intelligence, and malware analysis. She also has a minor [citation needed] interest in human-computer interaction, particularly the SEKI nano computer project. The most prominent figure of this project, the leader himself, has a cult following. Which might explain why some people in the family think she’s into satanism. Unlike the project leader, she believes she has a better, more innocent use of this emerging tech.

“Kid, are you okay?”

“Are you really a witch like Uncle [Uncle Name] said?” Oh shit I got too excited and asked for the wrong thing!

She just let out a sigh and told me, “I mean I kinda am. I disassemble ELF’s for a living.” Oh, that’s a very sadistic witch. I thought witches and elves get along.

Another thing I stalked was her LinkedIn profile, and boy that was a gold mine of information. Well, not personal information, but this is how I discovered her interests and her connections. She might not be the most powerful nor influential person in her company but she knows lots of them. Apart from that I found her recent post where she’s looking for an assistant for her low-level programming project. All you needed was a proficiency in C (and optionally, Assembly). Well, I’ve learnt quite a few C++, shouldn’t be that hard. And I thought, she could be my mentor!

She definitely know more than me about security, she can teach me a thing or two! And I will deliver, I will impress her, and maybe, just maybe, I will be–

“Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be here with me right now. I don’t want your parents to think I just converted you into a satanic. Which isn’t true by the way. First, they don’t believe in Satan. Second, I’m not part of any of that, I’m just interested in their technology, that’s all.” She said as she packed up her things.

I panicked and said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait! They won’t care anyway! Also you should hire me!”

“Hire you? You haven’t even graduated high school anyway. Also, do I look like HR to you?” She replied, as she laughed.

Which made me even more panicky. Realizing how stupid I was, I said, “No I mean like, that post erm in your, uh, look, with all due respect, I stalked you.”

“You did what? I knew it, had a weird feeling from the start.”

“Yes, everyone was talking about you, it wasn’t that hard figuring you out. Anyway, your LinkedIn, few weeks ago? Looking for an assistant? I’m interested.” And I started introducing myself with an elevator pitch out of habits. However she just laughed at the end.

Does she think I’m not good enough for her?

“You’re funny, I really like you.”

“But I wasn’t joking.” I said, I didn’t get it.

“I know. You’re just, silly. You made me laugh so effortlessly. Like, who the fuck stalked her distant relative that everyone warned her about?”

“I’m really sorry our first meet has to be–”

“And then you asked me if I’m a witch, realized that was probably not what you meant to ask, and finally asked to get hired by delivering an elevator pitch. Kid, don’t apologize! I quite like you.”

Well that was new for me. Whenever I panicked it usually made things more awkward. And when I made things more awkward, everyone distanced themselves from me. But for some reasons she liked it. She quite likes me.

“What’s your name again? Lin is it? Okay, Lin, I’d really like to work with you, but–”

“I’ll just lie to my parents. I’ll tell them I want to stay here for a while so they’ll leave me and I can be with you.”I never responded to anything as quick as that before.

She looked at me, a bit shocked from what I just said. “Lying to your parents I see…. Tell me, is your case abusive or avoidant?”

I was confused.

“Never mind. You’re hired, I guess.”

I’ve never been this happy before. So, I immediately replied, “cool! When do we start working?”

Once again she laughed and shook her head. “Lin, we’re at a funeral. Your grandma’s funeral. And you’re already asking when to start working? You’re more workaholic than me!”

Realizing how silly the situation got, I laughed along with her. She told me to meet her again at night as she continued packing her things up. I think we’ll get along pretty well.