Chapter 97 The Matrix? The Terrifying Counterattack of the Starsea Cyber ​​Security Department

John's eyes were bloodshot, like a gambler who had stayed up for three days and nights.

He grabbed the balding expert by the tie and yanked him upward with force.

The expert's feet left the ground, and his neck was constricted so tightly he started rolling his eyes.

His hands flailed in mid-air, trying to pry open that iron-like grip.

The shattered glass shards from the coffee cup crunched under his leather shoes, a sound that set one's teeth on edge.

"Say that again?"

John gritted his back teeth, the muscles on his cheeks twitching violently.

"A private Chinese factory that sells tablets paralyzed the North America backbone network? Do you think I'm some idiot who's been sitting in an office for only one day!"

The expert's face turned red, and a wheezing sound like a broken bellows squeezed out of his throat.

"It's, it's really paralyzed, sir! They left a backdoor."

He gasped for air with difficulty, tears of strain welling up in his eyes.

"Millions of devices turned into botnet nodes, and a data flood turned our broadband servers into mush!"

John loosened his grip.

The expert fell onto the Persian rug, clutching his neck and coughing violently.

Shards of porcelain dug into his thigh, and he didn't even dare to touch them.

"Go find people."

John panted heavily, ripped off the tie constricting his neck, and threw it fiercely onto the floor.

"Get all those high-paid top hackers in Silicon Valley up! Coordinate them with the Cybersecurity Bureau's military servers!"

He bent down, staring at the expert on the floor, his eyes harboring a murderous glint.

"Follow the jump servers, and hack into the main server in Donghai City at the physical level."

John straightened up, his leather shoes crushing the broken glass.

"I want to turn the Xinghai Technology database, along with that Lu Jingming, into a pile of scrap metal!"

Donghai City, Xinghai core server room.

The cooling fans were running like crazy.

Red alarm lights swept wildly across the white walls, and the ear-piercing buzzing scraped against one's eardrums.

"Beep, beep, beep—"

A dozen warning pop-ups with bloody skulls appeared on the main console screen.

Chu Xuan clutched his head and crouched on the anti-static floor, his center-parted hair completely disheveled.

"Oh my mother, this alarm sounds just like an air raid."

He swallowed dryly and looked up at the screen.

"Boss Lu, isn't this retaliation from the foreigners coming too fast? Is our security door sturdy enough?"

Lu Jingming leaned against the server cabinet.

He held an empty mineral water bottle in his hand, the plastic bottle creaking as he squeezed it.

"Doors are meant to be broken."

He tossed the empty bottle precisely into a trash can three meters away and clapped his hands.

"The Americans are desperate; they've pulled out all their hidden ace hackers to bite us."

Xia Weiliang sat cross-legged on the main control chair, barefoot, her hands hammering away at the mechanical keyboard, leaving afterimages.

"These Silicon Valley rats are quite slippery."

She stared at the waterfall of refreshing attack logs, her brows knitted together.

"They're using seven layers of jump servers for camouflage and are brute-forcing our peripheral firewall."

She bit her lower lip, her fingers moving too fast to see.

"The computing power is too high; my manual coding can't block their distributed assault."

Lao Zhou was so anxious he kept rubbing his hands, sweat dripping onto the floor.

"Then what do we do! Once they sneak into the core database, Xinghai OS's secrets will be completely exposed!"

Lu Jingming walked to the main console.

He pulled out a folding chair and sat down, the chair legs screeching harshly against the tile.

"If human brains can't outmatch machines, then we use magic."

He turned his head and looked at Xia Weiliang's face, which was stained with instant noodle soup.

"Weiliang, open the cage."

Lu Jingming's voice was not loud, but it carried a touch of insane ruthlessness.

"Let 'AI Assistant' come out and see the world."

Xia Weiliang's hands, which were typing on the keyboard, suddenly stopped.

Her thick-rimmed glasses slid down half an inch.

"Wake up AI Assistant? That's still a prototype of a strong AI that hasn't been fully trained."

Her knuckles were somewhat pale, and her voice wavered.

"If it's let out to run wild without any restraints, it's easy to cause a major accident."

"What I want is for it to have no restraints."

Lu Jingming sneered, revealing one sharp canine tooth.

"The Americans treat us like soft persimmons. If we don't chop off their hands today, they'll come back tomorrow."

He tapped his fingers on the desktop twice.

"Release the hounds. Bite them to death."

Xia Weiliang took a deep breath.

She dragged the mouse rapidly and clicked on a dark blue icon hidden in the deepest part of the system.

She hit the Enter key heavily.

The buzzing in the server room stopped abruptly.

The chaotic warning pop-ups on the screen vanished instantly, turning into pitch black.

A water-drop-shaped light orb slowly lit up in the center of the screen, flickering with a deep blue glow.

A voice without any emotional fluctuation came from the server room speakers.

"AI Assistant has been awakened. Multiple malicious intrusions detected. Defense protocol upgraded."

Across the ocean, in a secret studio in California.

Several top hackers were chugging Red Bull, their keyboards clattering loudly.

"Done! The Chinese people's firewall is like paper."

A white hacker with dreadlocks chewed gum, his face full of disdain.

"Prepare to implant a low-level paralysis Trojan and burn their hard drives."

He had just hit the execute key.

The computer screen suddenly froze.

The previously smooth progress bar was stuck firmly at 99 percent.

"What the hell, what's going on?"

The white hacker frowned and clicked the mouse frantically.

In the Donghai City server room.

Xia Weiliang looked at the counterattack roadmap generated by AI Assistant and gasped.

"This computing power... it's too terrifying."

She pointed at the rapidly reverse-engineered code nodes on the screen, her throat dry.

"AI Assistant isn't defending at all. It's following the foreigners' attack packets and peeling back the jump servers layer by layer."

In the speakers, AI Assistant's voice sounded again, cold and bone-chilling.

"Physical IP locked. Starting reverse override overload command."

In the California studio.

The dreadlocked hacker's screen suddenly glitched.

Lines of strange, deep blue code were frantically tampering with his system permissions like a virus.

The mouse cursor darted around uncontrollably, and pop-up windows burst forth like crazy.

"Fuck! They've traced back to us! Cut the network!"

He yelled and reached out to pull the network cable from the back of the case.

It was too late.

AI Assistant's command bypassed the software layer directly and forcibly maxed out the CPU voltage.

The case fan emitted a roar like a tractor, its speed exceeding the limit.

"Bang!"

A muffled sound came from inside the case.

Immediately after, a pungent black smoke spewed out through the ventilation holes, sparks flying everywhere.

The motherboard burned through on the spot.

The dreadlocked hacker was so scared he fell to the ground, scrambling backward.

"Lunatics! These Chinese people are devils!"

He took out his phone with trembling hands, wanting to report it.

Only to find that the dozen high-end computers in the studio were all emitting black smoke.

Not only that.

All the data files on the internal cloud server they were connected to were instantly locked.

A 16-digit dynamic encryption password was applied to them.

Even their ten-year-old history was completely dug out.

Washington, North America Cybersecurity Bureau headquarters hall.

The atmosphere was as oppressive as a graveyard.

John Smith strode in.

His leather shoes clicked loudly on the floor.

He tugged at his tie and walked to the main console, staring intently at the surveillance screen that took up half the wall.

"How is the progress? Have those geniuses in Silicon Valley smashed the Donghai City server yet?"

John stood with his hands behind his back, his tone filled with a ruthless sense of certainty.

The Cybersecurity Bureau Chief stood beside him.

The fat man was constantly wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, his shirt soaked through at the back.

"Mr. John, something went wrong."

The Chief swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty.

"What went wrong? Taking the money of American taxpayers, and you can't even handle this small matter?"

John turned his head, his eyes looking like he wanted to kill.

Just as he finished speaking.

Hundreds of monitoring screens in the hall suddenly emitted a simultaneous "zzzt" electrical sound.

The waterfall of green defensive code instantly stalled.

As if wiped away by a rag.

The screen images flickered into static.

"What's going on! Cut the network!"

The Chief yelled at the top of his lungs, his fat hands smashing wildly on the console.

It was useless.

The static cleared.

The background of all screens turned into a deep, starry black.

A huge, deep blue light orb emerged.

That was the official logo of Xinghai Technology.

It hung quietly in the heart of the American Cybersecurity Bureau, like a silent slap in the face.

The color drained from John's face instantly.

He stepped back twice, his lower back hitting the metal edge of the console.

It hurt, but he couldn't feel it.

His eyes were fixed intently on that large screen.

Below the logo, a line of pure English slowly appeared.

White text on a black background, dazzling and eye-catching.

"Surprise , motherf * * kers ! Do you want to play a game ?"

Dead silence.

Dozens of cybersecurity experts in the hall were like they had been hit by a freezing spell, stunned and motionless.

John was panting heavily.

His hands were pressed on the desktop, his knuckles turning white.

"They... they hacked into our main control screen?"

The Cybersecurity Bureau Chief's legs were trembling, and he slumped into his swivel chair.

He looked at that provocative sentence, his eyes filled with desperate fear.

"Not just the big screen, sir."

The Chief's voice cracked, carrying an irrepressible sob.

"Just a moment ago, the entire internal network data of the Silicon Valley Hacker Alliance was locked."

He looked up at John's pale face.

"Wall Street's trading matching system has been stuffed with a bunch of junk commands, and the latency is now over ten seconds."

The Chief swallowed his last bit of dry saliva.

"This time, we really angered the King of Hell."