Chapter 510: Let's Make a Deal (Part 2)

Nandu, Ministry of State Security, headquarters building.

After receiving the notification, Liu Zhen, the current Director of the Ministry of State Security who had been chairing a regular high-level meeting in the eighth-floor conference room, wore a dark expression as he and over a dozen heads of various departments took a dedicated elevator directly to the data center located on the third basement level of the headquarters building.

They had only just walked in and pushed open the door when they heard the alarm in the data center blaring incessantly.

Liu Zhen's face grew even uglier; he took two quick strides to the side of a tall, thin man who was flushed and sweating profusely while directing the busy technical staff, and asked bluntly, "Little Wu, has the virus been cleared? What exactly is the situation? How could someone have planted a mine in the Ministry's intranet? What are you tech people even doing?"

Although he was a Director of the Ministry of State Security who had been promoted from an administrative position, Liu Zhen did not know much about many technical matters.

But having taken charge of the Ministry for nearly two years, two years was enough time for him to learn many things.

For instance, he rarely went online at home, but now he was very clear on the differences between the intranet, the internet, and the dark web.

The Ministry of State Security's intranet was a self-built local area network that did not have open access ports to the outside world; only some encrypted computers within the headquarters building could access it.

The security of the intranet was naturally incomparable to the loophole-ridden internet; as the headquarters intranet of one of China's only two intelligence agencies, the Ministry's intranet paid even more attention to security and confidentiality, not only having specialized technical personnel build several heavily guarded firewalls for it, but also having people regularly maintain and inspect every computer, server, and other device connected to the Ministry's intranet.

Therefore, in the nearly ten years since the Ministry's intranet was built, there had never been a record of intranet data leakage or foreign hackers invading the intranet by infecting computers at the Ministry headquarters to use as zombies.

However, this record was now clearly broken.

Because just over half an hour ago, a group of technical personnel from the Ministry's technical division responsible for intranet maintenance discovered, during a routine maintenance and inspection of the intranet, that a file package suspected to be a Trojan horse or virus had been planted within the Ministry's intranet.

Not to mention how the Ministry's intranet, which had always been very security-conscious, was easily breached?

The mere fact that the technical division had spent over half an hour without resolving the file that an outsider had planted in the intranet—not knowing if it was a Trojan or a virus—was enough to shock the entire Ministry of State Security.

Although as a national intelligence agency, the Ministry's classified materials and information were still kept and stored using paper records and were not stored on the intranet, much of the daily work required the use of the intranet for transmission and processing, and no one dared to guarantee that among the leaked data, there was no intelligence that needed to be kept secret.

Just thinking about it made Liu Zhen break out in a cold sweat.

The Little Wu whom Liu Zhen was holding accountable was named Wu Qingyuan, the head of the technical section under the Ministry's Technical Department specifically responsible for intranet security maintenance.

Upon seeing his top boss's foul face, Wu Qingyuan could not even bother to wipe the oily sweat from his face, and answered in a hoarse voice: "Director, the file suspected to be a Trojan or virus cannot be handled for the time being... The operating system used by the computers in our Ministry's intranet is developed based on the open-source software Linux... The intruder clearly possesses a root-level vulnerability in the Linux system that we are unaware of, so the technical team cannot currently delete or block this software suspected of being a Trojan or virus from accessing intranet information..."

To put it bluntly, they were actually paying off debts for their predecessors.

The Linux system is an open-source software, created by the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds at the end of the last century, and is a Unix-like operating system.

Because Linux was shared with the world by its founder, anyone could take it and use it.

And because the Linux source code was fully disclosed and shared with everyone, over several decades, through the continuous improvement and deduction by tens of thousands of computer engineers from all over the world, hundreds of different versions of Linux were born; all countries, enterprises, and individuals could develop operating software that met the needs of various governments, research institutions, and defense agencies based on their requirements.

Wanting to develop an operating software is far more difficult than the average person imagines.

This difficulty is not only reflected in the sheer volume of code in an operating software, which far exceeds that of ordinary software.

The most difficult part is compatibility—the compatibility between software and hardware, and between software and software; after all, some compatibility issues can be solved by technology, while others cannot.

It is no exaggeration to say that if one wants to develop a brand-new operating system from scratch, one would see nothing with an investment of less than ten billion Chinese Yuan.

When the Microsoft CEO was promoting Win7 to replace XP, he once mentioned that Microsoft spent nearly 2 billion US dollars to develop this system.

There is certainly some exaggeration in this, but the high cost of developing an operating system for the general public can be seen from this glimpse.

The Ministry of State Security has its own technical team and also receives special state funding every year, but no matter how high this funding is, it is impossible for any high-level official to put the cart before the horse and allocate a huge sum of money to develop their own operating software.

The operating system used by the Ministry's intranet was purchased from a domestic professional software development company.

That enterprise, which possessed the qualifications for national defense and military procurement, deleted a large amount of unnecessary things on the basis of the Linux system after receiving the outsourcing project, and at the same time focused on perfecting and upgrading security and protection.

In a sense, they actually did a fairly qualified job; although the operating system sold to the Ministry of State Security was far inferior to Microsoft's products in terms of comprehensive functionality, it still had its merits in terms of security and protection.

However, the Linux system has never been a perfect operating system.

Precisely because it opened its source code to everyone, those different versions shared on online communities have been developed by who knows how many programmers.

Limited by the strength of their skills, there are even some malicious people who specifically leave behind vulnerabilities and backdoors in the source code that only they know about, so it is hard to say which version of the Linux system does not have vulnerabilities.

And once a vulnerability exists, especially a root-level vulnerability hidden deep within billions of lines of code, even the strongest system has the possibility of being invaded.

After being given a simple popular science introduction to the problem by Wu Qingyuan, Liu Zhen's face did not look much better.

"... If you can't delete it, can't you stop it from accessing the intranet? Can the technical team track where the stolen data went? Can you determine where the other party invaded the intranet from?"

The person asking was the head of the Security Department, whose name was Zhang Qinglin.

Wu Qingyuan shook his head, but his expression was slightly better than before: "... Our intranet does not have permission to access the internet, so this suspicious file that suddenly appeared in our intranet could only have been transmitted to the intranet through a computer port within the Ministry of State Security that can log into the intranet... Just now, I already had the technical team temporarily shut down the base stations within the headquarters, so the data stolen by the suspicious file should have only had a small portion transmitted away, and the vast majority is still saved on some computer within this building..."

"Currently, Group One and Group Two are handling this unknown file, and Group Three, Group Four, and Group Five have already begun, accompanied by personnel from the Security Department, to conduct a one-by-one inspection of all servers and computers connected to the intranet; news will be coming soon!"

Just as he was speaking, a burst of hurried footsteps came from outside the door.

Not long after, a tall, fat young man wearing thick-rimmed glasses pushed the door open with a 'clack', ran in hurriedly, and shouted loudly: "... Section Chief... found... found it..."

The tall, fat young man could not bother to wipe the sweat from his face, holding a shiny silver USB drive high in his hand.

Wu Qingyuan was overjoyed upon hearing this and hurriedly walked up, "Liu Jun, what did you find?"

The tall, fat young man was a technician from the Fourth Group of his network technical division, named Liu Jun.

Seeing him hand over the shiny silver USB drive, Wu Qingyuan hurriedly took it, but still asked a question.

Liu Jun took two deep breaths, only then noticing the dozen or so real bigwigs from the Ministry standing in the data center, and suddenly his mouth became a bit clumsy.

"... Th-this is the USB drive used to upload... upload the file... it was... it was discovered on Machine No. 45 on the third floor..."

Liu Zhen's face grew even darker upon hearing this; he glanced at Zhang Qinglin, and Zhang Qinglin, whose expression was also not very good, nodded and walked out.

The Security Department is the department responsible for the Ministry of State Security's security and also shoulders the task of counter-espionage.

Zhang Qinglin is the head of the Security Department; now that a suspicious file has been planted in the Ministry's intranet and it has been discovered that it was uploaded to the intranet via an internal computer, this is already an extremely egregious case, and the mastermind behind it must be caught as soon as possible.

Wu Qingyuan waved over two technical personnel and carefully handed the USB drive to them, "Go to the security room and check it, be careful..."

Their technical section has its own security room, which is not connected to the internet and is fully equipped with various testing equipment; even if this USB drive had been formatted, the previous data could still be recovered.

After sending them off, Liu Zhen, along with the two Deputy Directors and several division chiefs, had already gathered together and began to talk in low voices.

"... This is an extremely egregious enemy-agent intrusion incident, what do you think?"

"Director Liu, do you think we should report this to the Presidential Palace first?"

"... I don't think so for now; let's wait for the Security Department's investigation report to come out. Currently, we still cannot determine how many files our intranet has leaked..."

"... Could it be related to the CIA? Last month they lost quite a few people within Nandu, and the Americans have been suspecting that we did it; recently they have arrested many of our expatriate personnel..."

"It's possible..."

Seeing that no one was paying him any mind, Wu Qingyuan breathed a slight sigh of relief and took a few steps back to make it easier for the big shots to communicate.

He didn't expect that before he had even walked far, a "bang" sounded not far away, instantly attracting all the gazes that had been communicating in low voices over here.

Wu Qingyuan also looked over, only to see that a few meters away, a young man holding a custom-made, heavy laptop had accidentally bumped into the desk beside him.

Seeing that it was one of his subordinates from the technical staff, he was just about to put on a stern face and scold him a couple of times, when he saw the young man's face twisted, clearly in great pain from the bump just now.

But the somewhat balding young man still limped over while twitching, "Section... Section Chief, Bureau Chief, the suspicious file has been opened..."