Creation

 

 In my world, we are very different. There, the weather is so varied, while here I only get rain, sometimes clouds, then rain again, sometimes the sun doesn't come out at all, sometimes the sun rises until nighttime and it still feels like daytime. What's even sadder is that the nights here are very cruel. Criminals like to strike in the early hours of the morning. I’m used to sitting alone outside at night, without music, just silence and solitude. My parents don’t know; they’re asleep. When I sit outside, there are many sounds of the wind very close to my ears, but the sound of mosquitoes isn’t heard at all. It’s very quiet and peaceful. I close my eyes and look at the cloudy, dark sky. The wind grows colder and stronger, and my mother’s plants begin to sway. If you’ve ever watched a horror movie, this situation is more terrifying than that, especially when you’re alone in the silence. Occasionally, some cars pass by, especially those starting to deliver vegetables at dawn. The wind pierces through, making my nose ache from the cold, but I enjoy it. My hair started to get messy; the wind was really touching me. I stared at the dark sky without thinking about anything. Every time I looked at it, I would occasionally close my eyes and take a slow breath, but tears started to wet my face. I didn’t know why the tears were coming out, even though I didn’t feel sad at that moment. I felt nothing but the cold wind and the pain in my nose. A cat appeared across from me. The cat had been around my house for a long time, but we didn’t keep it. It just stayed around the house; it didn’t sit with me, it was across from me, licking its paws and lowering its head. It began to close its eyes, as if intending to accompany me. My gaze was fixed on the cat. I didn’t think about anything as I stared at it, just as I did when I stared at the black sky. I truly knew what it felt like to be empty, very empty. I wrote all this not because I was sad or confused; I wrote wherever I wanted and whenever I needed to. Writing helped me express everything that could no longer be stored in my head. I’m not sick either; I’m very healthy, but I can’t guarantee that I’m truly okay. In my main job, my mind is fully focused on various tasks inside and outside the office. In personal matters, my mind works harder than my body. I’m striving to achieve great things here. I’ve made too many enemies here, far too many. Even to start a new relationship, I have to be very careful every day. It’s exhausting being the person who has to pretend not to know while the players keep changing. I have to master many ways to ensure no one knows who I am or what I do; I have to keep everything under control or I’ll get into trouble, and my family might also be affected by it. Right now, I’m in a small town with a new job and my real name. Ten years ago, it was very painful for me. Now there are some people who want my attention for my business. Yes, they’re all men, some are married, some have broken families, and some are young, wealthy men because their parents’ financial support is strong. I chose some of the young, wealthy men because they’re still relatively safe and still seem confused when discussing OUR BUSINESS RULES. Of course, they’re relatively safe because their world is still colorful. My world is not. My world is no longer colorful. If someone thinks I’m very colorful, it means I’ve succeeded. I didn’t know God ten years ago, even though my religion is listed on my ID card according to my parents’ family registration. Yes, I didn’t know Him, but there came a day when I had to get to know Him more deeply, even study Him as thoroughly as possible. There are many gods with different names in religions, both in my country and in this world. To simply comfort myself, sometimes I go to places of worship, sometimes I sit in a church, sometimes I stand before a Buddha statue, sometimes I sit in a temple, and of course, I pray in a mosque. Since then, to fill the void within me, I read about the religions in my country, both those that are recognized and those seeking recognition. I delved deeply into my knowledge of some things related to that, so in the second year, I decided to choose myself as a Muslim. A Muslim without a hijab or wide robe. I have reasons for that, and I can prove it in the holy book of Islam, the Quran. I stopped delving into it in the second year because I felt it was enough, and it helped me when I truly faced some of my enemies; People who do not believe in religion will not care, but perhaps they will understand after they experience it and explore it. Last night I had another bad dream; yes, having bad dreams in a row is not a good thing. Even when I sit still like a statue, I remember my past, about silly incidents, some of which almost got me killed, involving armed men. But sometimes I wonder why I am always connected to people like that. It seems almost impossible for me to meet people from other professions. I am always connected to them, but in different forms and bodies. It all started with a silly incident when I was in college.

My first year studying information systems, software, and hardware became an integral part of my daily life. After two years, I joined my university's cybersecurity team. Yes, the first time I actually sat at a desk in the campus basement, cool, right? No, not cool at all. The place was terrifying; some team members were very sensitive to newcomers and often treated freshmen poorly. They respected me not because I was a talented student or anything like that, but because a professor had sent me to join directly. At first, I managed the database for the new student learning account website. Then, one of my seniors invited me to learn about master developer account security. Yes, the cyber world was my first world. They were real; some of my seniors created secret groups for certain groups, and I wasn’t invited, but I knew about it. Then came the day of judgment without any reason. A man who looked like a frog yes, I called him a frog because his glasses were very large and thick stood in front of my desk and said that what I had done had disrupted the university’s web server and made it inaccessible. That day, of course, I was shocked. I hadn’t done anything, not even changed anything on the firewall. Then I ran an IP scan and saw some unknown IPs trying to disrupt the network. They didn’t know I was tracking them myself until I found evidence that the secret group had intentionally caused the disruption, so I was deemed incompetent. They reported it to the teaching assistant, and I was deemed negligent at the time. I just stared at the male teaching assistant, and he said to me, “If you don’t intend to sit here with people who smell like burnt cables, please clear your desk over there; many students want to sit there.” I took my bag and closed my laptop. Without another word, I left. Yes, I left on my motorcycle, heading to a place far from the city that afternoon. I went to the fish lake on the outskirts of the city, bought some boiled corn, and ate it there. I listened to music, shared a little corn with the fish in the lake yes, they like boiled corn. I was happy to see it; the water was fairly clear, though not as green as mountain lakes. I enjoyed the moment and lay down for a while, watching the trees swaying in the wind above me. I took off my glasses and observed their shapes. I remembered something yes, something I would do for them. Before I tell the story, I won’t mention names or places. At the time, I was in my fifth semester. I risked my position if caught, I considered the risks and found the lowest risk of being caught. Yes, I initially did IDS but hadn’t implemented intrusion prevention. I returned to campus, searching for the secret group’s data, all their biographies yes, I really searched and found them. After obtaining their addresses, they were living in the same place they had rented one house with around six rooms. The front door was always open, so I just observed that day without doing anything. At night, I returned to their house and saw many motorcycles and one car parked in the yard. I continued observing the location, time, situation, neighbors, and road. I sat in a small store there. The small store sold many basic necessities, what we call a convenience store, so to avoid suspicion, I had to buy something that would allow me to stay there for a long time. Fortunately, there were chairs and tables, so I decided to buy cigarettes, instant noodles, and hot coffee. At least while waiting for the noodles to cook, I could use that time to observe every activity from that location. I noticed movement at midnight; someone closed the gate but then opened it again. My coffee hadn’t been touched at all. Someone walked toward the store, and I thought it would be bad if they recognized me. However, they didn’t recognize me at all, not even glancing my way. I stayed calm and started drinking my coffee and lighting my cigarette. When I lit the cigarette, he glanced in my direction yes, he just glanced but didn’t recognize me. Then he returned home and closed the gate. I thought I had a good idea yes, I’d go inside the house, I will create chaos like they did to me. I will retaliate against them one by one, in my own way. Starting that night, I did IP spoofing. I stayed up all night and didn't sleep until morning, until 6 a.m. I went to campus. I went to the campus basement, which was still empty and locked. At 8 a.m., I had to go to my basic statistics class. I entered the classroom briefly and asked permission to go to the restroom. I went to the basement to see if the cyber room was open.

Well, luck was on my side; the room was already open, but I didn't see anyone inside. It seemed like the person holding the key to the room was smoking outside, since the basement was very close to the entrance and exit and faced the parking area. The basement was small, with only three rooms: the cyber room, the campus cafeteria, and the campus security room. Without thinking twice, I went straight into the room. Of course, the room was equipped with CCTV, but the CCTV wasn’t on. I didn’t know if they turned it off when everyone left. Yes, this campus was pretty corrupt and run-down; electricity costs might be the reason they turned off a lot of the lights after classes ended at night. I accessed the campus’s main computer. The mistake these people made was underestimating most other students, as if they felt cool for controlling the university’s cyber system. They weren’t paid; in fact, they were treated the same as other students studying there, except they were given special access to secure the university’s servers under the guidance of an IT professor. From the moment I entered, I observed everything, and sometimes accidentally saw my senior log into the computer using an extremely easy-to-remember password. Even elementary school students could remember it a password without any characters is the silliest password to me. This is the silly password 1234567812345678; it seems he was tired. I was free to control the computer, but my time was very limited. Yes, the room smelled of burnt cables, which made my adrenaline spike at the time. I logged into the Google account and found login activities from various emails. I took photos of those emails and saved the password history, only the ones that were saved. Yes, I obtained the passwords from those groups. I deleted the search history and immediately shut down the computer as before. Less than 8 minutes because the computer was quite slow to boot up, but no problem, now I’ll play a game. I slowly opened the old, thick iron door and left. I returned to class. Class ended at 10 a.m. for lunch break. I fled to the internet café (paid internet café), the favorite spot for crazy people to access the internet. Of course, the internet café owner is often deceived because they use a VPN. Of course, full access can be controlled by paying less than 20,000 rupiah for 3 hours. I’m one of them. I launched an action to access all their email content; yes, I even laughed out loud after reading their emails and junk mail. I easily created a fake IP address using that email. It’s very comprehensive; I can create any type of fake IP address as desired. Someone might perform an IDS and find their IP address, just as they did to me, but they weren’t vigilant. Faking an IP address isn’t cool enough if it’s still detectable, because we know IP addresses change, we can detect and filter vulnerable IP flows, so those who forget to delete them will be detected, and that’s the end of them. They thought it was just a trivial game of creating fake IPs to eliminate someone they might not like. Yes, they didn’t like me; I was the only woman there at the time. So I proved it to them, including the professor who assigned me to join the campus cyber team. I took over all the campus servers until the main server couldn’t do anything, including preventing the intrusion I was causing. I disrupted the system for about three days. At that point, disrupting the system alone wasn’t enough, in my opinion, because they would reset many routers and server firewalls. I prepared another step—yes, I would disrupt all access for those bastards. I called my father and asked for 3 million rupiah; I bought a DIY USB made in my country, which was quite expensive. Because that would help me complete my mission faster. That night, I decided to walk there. Yes, I walked to the rental house of those scoundrels while they were busy trying to prevent my intrusion using their own IP addresses. I left my motorcycle at the internet café. That night, the wind was blowing strongly, and the sky began to drizzle. I hurried my steps and arrived there. The situation was calm; the door was open as usual. At the wide-open gate, I saw the door welcoming me, I entered without taking off my shoes and opened the first room, one of their rooms. I didn’t know whose room it was. I saw the PC and turned on the computer’s CPU. I began installing the trojan horse. Yes, I named my USB drive “trojan.” The virus had entered. Yes, this person didn’t lock their PC, or maybe it was just a PC for gaming. I didn’t know. I set a password on the PC just for fun, and also created a fake access point to match the IP of the fake access point I created. The cyber team would easily know if the perpetrator was from their own group. And the fake IP address would be considered genuine, with the wireless access point on their own computer. Yes, they succeeded in creating their own devil; they succeeded in forming me. I had already set a password on the PC, so they would have to hack into their own computer to unlock it again. The rain was pouring heavily, and I looked for a plastic bag in the room because my books would get wet. The thunder sounded loud, and I walked slowly, even stopping near the fence and looking back. I wondered why they had done that to me, and nature gave me the chance to retaliate. I continued my journey back to the internet café. Yes, I was caught in the rain and soaked to the bone. I returned to my dorm and took a shower. Then I cooked instant noodles and brewed coffee. When I turned on the laptop, I checked the campus server to see if the problem was still there? Yes, the campus server was still blank.

Of course, I wouldn’t be that kind to fix it. I was satisfied with my revenge. If they managed to fix it, maybe they’d be more careful and not underestimate anyone again. Yes, the next morning after I arrived, the entire campus was buzzing about the hacker, and the news spread widely, with the cyber team becoming the topic of all IT students. I just listened to the negative gossip spreading everywhere, some saying our campus server was hacked, others saying the cyber team failed to secure the network. Students couldn’t upload their assignments to the campus learning account, forcing most professors to choose Dropbox as an alternative.

I studied as usual without leaving a trace, until someone asked to borrow my laptop to work on our final project, which involved working on the database server. He said his laptop had completely shut down, possibly infected with a virus, so I lent him my laptop. He was a quiet man, also skilled in coding. I knew enough because he was my rival in the class when it came to coding. After finishing, he wanted to treat me to coffee, which surprised me. To be honest, I didn’t have any friends in class; those who approached me were only using me for study tasks. I accepted the quiet man’s offer, and we went to a café near campus. Then he started the conversation, “Are you still part of the campus cyber team?” I replied, “I haven’t been in touch with them for a long time.” He smiled broadly and said, “You’re really cool; people wouldn’t think the server chaos was your doing.” I was shocked to hear that and stared at him sharply. “Don’t worry, I’m on your side, but you should humiliate them. You should spread their faces across the entire server. That would be the first historic event on our campus.” I told him that if I had to do more than that, I would have done it from the start, but that’s an unclassy move, and it would definitely go viral and end up on TV news. It would definitely happen. Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of person who needs recognition. I just can't accept them tarnishing my name for a mistake I didn't make just to get me kicked out of the team. Now they all deserve it. If they still have brains, they'll learn from their own mistakes. So, how does it feel to get revenge? “It's so much fun.”

I just tried it, and my experiment worked.