Chapter 13 - "THE BOARDROOM SABOTAGE THAT THREATENED EVERYTHING"
The message was clear: Vanessa Cole was watching their every move, and someone inside their inner circle was feeding her real-time intelligence.
The very next morning, catastrophe struck Harrison Freight's global operations. A massive malware strain, codenamed Phantom-7, infiltrated the company's automated shipping grids. Over four hundred cargo vessels across the Atlantic and Pacific suddenly lost steering controls, their navigational systems locked out. Port authorities worldwide issued emergency halts.
Stock value plummeted forty percent in forty-five minutes.
"If those ships miss their docking windows, the liability claims will bankrupt the company before midnight!" the Chief Financial Officer screamed during an emergency video conference. "Amy, as majority shareholder, you have to sign an emergency asset release to pay the ransom!"
Amy sat at the head of the boardroom table in New York, baby Clara resting peacefully in a carrier attached to her chest. She looked calmly around the room at the sweat-drenched faces of senior executives.
"We aren't paying a single cent of ransom," Amy declared, her voice cold as steel.
"Are you insane?!" the VP of Logistics shouted. "We lose fifty million dollars every hour!"
"We don't lose anything if the attack didn't come from the outside," Amy replied, leaning forward and placing a heavy flash drive on the table. "While my husband was analyzing the malware, I had our independent audit firm track the IP signature of the encryption key. It didn't originate from a hacker collective in Eastern Europe."
May you like
She pressed a button on her tablet, projecting a security log onto the massive wall screen.
"The key was issued from an executive terminal right here in this room twenty minutes before the attack began," Amy said, her eyes pinning the Chief Financial Officer to his chair. "Specifically, from your private account, Mr. Vance."
