Chapter 358: Chapter 358

Xiang Shan was in his room, accessing the hacker community "The Risk," "风险".

The header featured a string of blood-red characters, "Catch Me If You Can" — "Come catch me if you dare."

From the name of the community to the materials on this header, an "illegal" vibe emanated.

Hackers have many communities. Naturally, these communities are diverse. Some are just for discussing computer knowledge, sharing programming insights, and sharing programs they’ve written themselves. Plugins, patches, nothing dangerous about them.

But others were completely different. They taught remote control techniques, bypassing protective software, even providing services like remote control, bypassing software, and DDOS. They taught people to steal accounts, invade, infiltrate, write Trojans, reverse engineer...

In most countries, such websites were considered "illegal". Once they grew in size, they would attract the attention of national security departments and would subsequently become inaccessible under various crackdowns, disappearing entirely.

Websites like these were as common as hairs on a cow and never lasted long; they sprang up and extinguished rapidly, yet they were never completely eradicated.

Restless souls were never in shortage.

Of course, Xiang Shan wasn’t having so many thoughts at this moment.

His first impression of this website was...

The creator must be someone obsessed with old movies and afflicted with adolescent fantasies.

"Risk" was a documentary about a famous hacker, and the provocative "Catch Me If You Can" was the title of a crime movie, rather well-known indeed.

Xiang Shan clicked into the site. A few days ago, under the surveillance of the cybersecurity department, he had temporarily registered an ID named "Ramanujan".

This type of website was a standard "Guerrilla Team base," requiring no identity proof, just an ID and a password. Xiang Shan originally thought it suitable to use an ID "Rama," as he was in charge of the Rama Project, but unfortunately, the ID "Rama" had already been taken. So Xiang Shan had no choice but to pick "Ramanujan"—a name belonging to a great mathematician. Before that mathematician, there was also a saint in the Vedic Religion named Ramanujan, who was the founder of the Ramanujan Sect. The name meant something like "Rama’s brother".

Xiang Shan swore that he really just used a search engine to quickly find a relevant keyword and didn’t deliberately choose a cool ID. After all, people from the cybersecurity department were watching, and he felt embarrassed to flip through a dictionary to find an appealing word. Latest content published on novel⟡fire.net

What Xiang Shan was now looking at was the discussion among the hackers about a series of incomprehensible codes.

Incidentally, the stolen data in later documents would be referred to as "Xiduo".

In mythology, "Xiduo" was "Rama’s" wife, who had been kidnapped by the ten-headed demon king, Ravana. With the help of the divine monkey, Hanuman, Rama found the demon king and defeated him, reclaiming his wife.

The hackers were actually very sensitive. Although they saw a string of data that nowhere on Earth’s computers could run, under the prestige of Zhu Rong, they studied these codes of "Xiduo" and truly felt a "pattern" inside.

This seemed to be a sensation highly based on "experience" and "intuition".

After this fact emerged, the hackers instead became excited. They began to speculate what exactly this "Xiduo" "alien technology" was.

After all, "Xiduo" really didn’t seem like something that would run on this generation’s computers.

And that translation software company in Europe, reportedly, had been hacked into a sieve. Those hackers were in every corner of that company’s equipment, searching for protocols, tools, plugins that could provide the conditions to run these codes.

Of course, they found nothing.

But this "finding nothing" itself further fueled the hackers’ interest.

In the eyes of some who love a big spectacle, the general sentiment was...

"If it’s hidden this deep, it must hold shameful secrets."

So, the hackers proposed a collective effort to solve the mystery. A few hackers were already discussing on-site "whether we could write a simulator to run this data".

Xiang Shan was quite concerned about this issue.

Because the research department had also been making similar attempts these past few months, Xiang Shan had been involved in some of the work.

Of course, Xiang Shan felt the most promising approach was still to restore those pieces of alien junk to their original form, then make other attempts—like writing a compatibility protocol between it and Earth computers or programming Earth systems into the alien computer.

After all, the temporarily named "Orunmila" alien junk, was also a practical implementation of a Turing Machine. Starting from scratch to figure out coding was still achievable.

Placing a modern barebones machine in front of computer researchers from the 1960s, those researchers might also figure out a way to program it. Although definitely not as well as modern programmers, it could at least run.

However, these wildly imaginative assumptions by the hackers still stirred him somewhat.

The hackers did not know what the full extent of the data exported from "Orunmila" was, and it was even less likely for them to know the "functionality" of the data contained in "Xiduo" [after all, even Xiang Shan did not know]. For them, this data was just a segment shaped very oddly, and a "black box" that could not be run temporarily; they were unable to see what was inside the "box."

However, this did not stop them from tampering with the code contained in "Xiduo" by various means.

It was precisely because "Xiduo" was so mysterious that more and more hackers wanted to take a peek into it.

At this point, what the real nature of the data contained in "Xiduo" was had become unimportant; it had turned into a celebration that existed only among a few tech enthusiasts.

The hackers were also cracking it with all their might.

And this noise eventually alarmed the security department of the Rama Project.

To be precise, it was the technicians in the cybersecurity department who, while browsing this community, stumbled upon this data. They keenly sensed the problem, then downloaded the data publicly released by "Zhu Rong" and compared it with the internal data of the Rama Project.

Only then was the "data leak incident" discovered.

At the time of the incident, several major countries had thought about taking down this website. But "Zhu Rong" had uploaded these data a few days earlier, and there had been thousands of downloads and visits. Moreover, this data might have been shared again within some more closed communities.

In short, the situation was already irreparable.

Experts analyzed that shutting down this community now would only stimulate those hackers further.

The best approach was to downplay the major issues and ignore the minor ones as if they did not exist.

And it was because of this that Xiang Shan got to see these discussions.

It had to be said, some of the ideas were quite interesting. Xiang Shan quietly took note of them, planning to share them with the research department and to try them out himself.

This involved a somewhat awkward reality. The Rama Project had been hastily set up. Aside from the Federation, which had been the first to enter the scene and had pre-arranged preparations, all other countries were disrupted by this matter and only sent scholars who were "trustworthy and capable;" trustworthiness came first. Therefore, although the scholars within the Rama Project District were all top-level, there were many others outside of the same level who could not possibly be entirely encompassed.

Sadly, those with a special knack for "cracking" were all unstable elements. These hackers might have been able to make a small mark in the field of computer science, but they almost certainly could not pass the political vetting to enter this park of the Rama Project.

Their perspectives and technical concepts were diametrically opposed to someone like Xiang Shan, who came from an academic background and emphasized "construction," so many of the ideas they proposed were ones that Xiang Shan had not thought of before and were easy to overlook.

This even made Xiang Shan think, "It would be great if they could also participate in the research."

But that was just a thought.

At that moment, there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Xiang Shan said.

The person who entered was Officer Hu. This official, responsible for coordinating the Republic’s scholars with the district organization, was already very familiar to Xiang Shan. Since taking over the position of head of the research department, Officer Hu had almost exclusively handled interactions with him.

Officer Hu said enthusiastically, "Director Xiang, this is a comrade from our hometown. I heard that you have met before."

Xiang Shan was a bit surprised to see the person behind Officer Hu, "Officer Lei?"

The visitor was none other than the military man with sharp brows and starry eyes who had initially recruited him into this project. Having not seen him for years, the military man’s appearance had not changed at all. He stood at attention, saluted Xiang Shan, and said, "Republic Liberation Army, stationed at the United Nations Military Staff Committee, Lei Chaoyang. I am really sorry, Director Xiang, the last time we met, I did not tell you my real name."

"You even brought your shoulder insignia this time," Xiang Shan scanned briefly, "Should I address you as Colonel Lei? You probably weren’t working at the United Nations Military Staff Committee these past few years, right?"

"You can call me Staff Officer Lei or Colonel Lei, and if it makes you happy, you can even call me Old Lei," Colonel Lei smiled and was easy to talk to, but he did not answer Xiang Shan’s latter question.

Soon, with Officer Hu’s explanation, Xiang Shan quickly understood the situation.

Colonel Lei was here this time to participate in what was tentatively named as the "Hanuman Project Working Group." This group was created temporarily in response to the "leak incident," and theoretically, Xiang Shan was the person in charge.

And Colonel Lei was responsible for coordinating Xiang Shan with the Republican military authorities.

Xiang Shan frowned, "The military... is this matter related to the military? Does the military need to step in?"

"It’s still uncertain," Colonel Lei shook his head, "This incident has now been classified as a ’terrorist attack.’ If the true nature of the ’Rama Project’ gets disclosed to society, who knows what kind of upheaval will ensue. Therefore, the countries will cooperate to resolve this incident."

"At least, ’Zhu Rong’ this dangerous element must be controlled."