Chapter 10 of 10

Chapter 10

14 min read3,579 words

After a few seconds, Feng Xiaotian noticed something was wrong. The computer operating system he was familiar with had suddenly increased by 1.5 terabytes! For an ordinary person, who would remember the size of the computer operating system so clearly? Only a weirdo like Feng Xiaotian would do that.

Since he had discovered that the system had increased by 1.5 terabytes, Feng Xiaotian naturally wouldn't ignore it. He immediately started searching for what this extra part was. He opened the computer operating system and quickly browsed through the information. In less than two minutes, he finally found the extra content.

It was a very inconspicuous program. To hide itself, it had even disguised itself as a system graphics processing program. If Feng Xiaotian didn't know the system inside out, it would have been no easy task to find this thing.

Without any hesitation, Feng Xiaotian immediately started to remove it. However, when he clicked "Delete," the program suddenly went crazy and began to replicate itself at an extremely fast rate!

Why was this happening? The reason was simple: the activation command for this Trojan virus was "Delete"! The young man who wrote this Trojan virus was indeed a master. He understood human psychology well, knowing that when people found an extra program on their computer, their first thought would be to remove it. How could they remove it? The simplest and most direct method was to delete it. Therefore, the young man set "Delete" as the activation command for the Trojan virus. No matter who clicked "Delete," the virus would instantly activate.

Feng Xiaotian watched as the program continued to replicate itself crazily, the limited storage space of the computer being eroded by its growing size. He was stunned for a few seconds, then he began to act!

Feng Xiaotian's method was simple: he created a new empty system folder and moved the virus into it, then immediately deleted the folder.

Although Feng Xiaotian had never written a virus program, he knew the main way this virus operated. According to his understanding, the self-replication of this virus had only one purpose: to fill up the entire disk space and eventually "kill" the computer. Since the virus couldn't be directly deleted and it was located at the core of the system, there was almost no way to solve it. In that moment, Feng Xiaotian thought of a very simple but effective method—put the virus into a new folder and delete it without going through the virus itself.

Clearly, this method was very effective. Sometimes, the solution to a problem isn't as complicated as one might imagine, but it's easily overlooked. Feng Xiaotian was able to think of this because he was very calm and his thinking was unique, which is why he succeeded.

Seeing the virus disappear from his computer, Feng Xiaotian sat in his chair and fell into deep thought. This was the first time he had encountered such a situation. He never thought that the legendary hackers would confront him so quickly. Although there was no direct confrontation, this experience gave him a more intuitive understanding of hackers. Some things may seem distant, but they can suddenly happen when you least expect it.

After thinking for a while, Feng Xiaotian took action. He had a bold idea: to infect his computer with this virus again and then analyze and crack it!

Without hesitation, Feng Xiaotian clicked on the New York Times website again. The computer interface flickered, and Feng Xiaotian, who was familiar with the process, easily opened the system folder and found the virus program.

This program wasn't large, only 1.5 terabytes. Feng Xiaotian began to analyze the program's operating principle. In less than ten minutes, he had a result. It turned out that this virus program was incomplete. To run it, it needed to be completed. How could it be completed? The answer was simple—input the activation command.

The activation command was actually the incomplete part of the program. Clearly, the "Delete" command was the missing part of the program.

Of course, the "Delete" command itself didn't have this capability, as it was a function of the system. However, one point couldn't be overlooked: the system's operation also required data processing. For example, when you want to delete a file from your computer, you right-click to open a dialog box, then left-click on the "Delete" command. The computer receives this command, processes it internally, and then completes the command through the system program.

This was the magic of computers. Any command was pre-set, and to execute a command, you had to choose a matching program from the pre-set data. When you issued a command, the computer would process it according to the pre-set method and produce the corresponding result.

The virus program operated based on this principle. It was linked to the "Delete" command in the computer. Once the computer processed the data related to the "Delete" command, it would treat this as an activation command and start running.

Feng Xiaotian now understood the principle of how the virus operated. His next step was to figure out how to crack the virus. For others, this might be a difficult problem, but for Feng Xiaotian, it was simple. First, he used the virus as a template and rewrote multiple programs inside it. Through his reprogramming, the virus became a completely different program.

In simple terms, the original virus had the ability to infect and replicate. After Feng Xiaotian's modifications, it became a specialized tool to eliminate the virus. It could find any program with a similarity of 70% or more in the computer and take action. It would create a folder, include itself and the target program, and then execute the final command—delete the folder.

Of course, there was a prerequisite: to complete the virus elimination task, it first needed to infect a computer with the relevant virus. This gave Feng Xiaotian pause.

Feng Xiaotian spent only ten minutes writing this specialized tool, but the next fifteen minutes were spent in deep thought. The reason was simple: he wasn't sure whether he should embed this specialized tool on the New York Times website.

This was a hacking behavior. Even though Feng Xiaotian was doing a good deed, deliberately infiltrating a website was fundamentally not allowed. However, if he didn't do this, the virus would cause serious consequences. How should he choose between the two?

---