It was one of those strange little bursts of insight better left unmentioned. Cody and Don were at dinner in a nice little Italian restaurant. She reached across the table, ran her index finger across the top of his hand, and finally said, “I love you, Don.” He flinched slightly at the word love and glanced down at the checkered tablecloth. She instantly suspected he was cheating on her. That night in bed, she was sure of it.
Over the next few days, Cody hired a private detective. Within a week, he reported back to her with the unhappy news that Don was having a torrid affair with Cindy Jensen, their boss and the owner of Bright Idea, their advertising company. The detective showed Cody some truly disturbing pictures. She wondered how he had managed to get them, but she didn’t ask. She was too angry to really care, and more angry than hurt. From the time she was a little girl, she had been taught that a woman should be patient and forgiving, but only to a point. After that, all bets were off. Holding an unrelenting grudge was a sign of strength in her family. Like her mother, Cody was a cunning woman with a mean streak shrouded in guile. She began plotting the most damaging form of retaliation she could think of, with an eye to never getting caught.
Cody was more interested in hurting Cindy than Don. Ruining Bright Idea’s computer network seemed like the best manageable strategy. Granted, she worked in Human Resources and had only a rudimentary understanding of the company’s intranet, but this wasn’t about to stop her. Over the next year, she spent endless hours learning code online in order to hack into the system and paralyze the business. The company only kept certain physical files for a few years. Everything else, the majority of information, was kept online, so she knew she could destroy most of the information the business needed to survive.
Once she had a good understanding of what to do, Cody logged into the company network with a stolen IT administrator account and built a backdoor into the system that allowed her access from a remote location. She collected everyone’s usernames and passwords with a key code capture. The IT staff had three backups, one of which was in a locked room and not connected to the company’s intranet. She implanted malware and planted electromagnetic pulse pens in strategic places. At this point, she was ready to attack.
On a quiet Saturday morning, she stopped into a Starbucks, ordered a Caffè Americano, and logged into her laptop. She routed her connection through thirteen different anonymous servers and thought about how she had left Don shortly after her discovery of the affair. She claimed that she was afraid of getting too deeply involved with anyone at that point in her life, which was probably true anyway. She sipped the last of her Americano and gently returned the empty cup to the table. Her hands were steady, and her mind was clear.
Then, she took down Bright Idea’s intranet mainframe and backups by uploading a data-destroying virus that had been incubating in the system for a full week before the attack. The virus infected all company computers, even the ones with remote logins. All company information was destroyed—anything hosted on the intranet and connected to the Internet, all accounting, payroll, banking, and tax record files, every SOP, administrative policy, and social media site relating to Bright Idea—all erased forever, never to be recovered.
Cody logged off, packed up her computer, and strolled outside. She was relieved but a little disappointed that her mission had ended. After all, she had never been so spectacularly successful in anything else she had ever done. She was proud of her accomplishment. She wasn’t even angry with Cindy and Don anymore. The scales had been balanced. It was time to take a long walk, enjoy the weather, and think about the inevitable chaos of Monday morning.
