4:30 AM, Palo Alto, California
The dark morning sky blanketed the city and the cool air that drifted from the Bay area into the streets of Palo Alto drifted all its residents into deeper sleep.
Well, almost all.
In one of the upscale communities, shielded by a tall private gate was a surprisingly modest modern home.
The home was big enough to fit only three bedrooms at most. Like most modern homes, this one had all its bedrooms on the second floor.
Unlike most houses at this hour in Palo Alto, this one had the lights in one of its rooms on, indicating that whoever lived there was awake.
The room was one of the bedrooms that had been repurposed into an office and sitting behind the computer on a work desk was Amelia Rhodes.
The Lead Security Architect at Google. A woman known for her no-nonsense approach to cybersecurity, and the one person in the entire division trusted to handle irregular threat reports without panicking or overreacting.
And currently, her eyes were narrowed on a certain anonymous email, contemplating whether it was a scam or another hacking attempt.
She leaned back on her chair, her fingers rapping on her work desk as she re-read the subject of the email,
[Vulnerabilities Detected on Google Internal Systems]
"Let's see what they're up to this time" Amelia decided after a few minutes before finally opening the email.
After all, dealing with hacking attempts was just another Tuesday for her.
The email seemed as clean as can be. It had no phishing links or anything that raised her suspicions, unlike previously received emails of this kind.
The email only held a message from the sender and an attachment titled [Vulnerability_report.pdf].
She read the email again, word for word, making sure she clearly understood what was in it.
According to the sender —OmniTech, he had found twenty vulnerabilities in their systems with a self-created software and he was willing to offer five to them for free.
"A way of gaining our attention," she muttered before adding "Smart".
Even though she said that she didn't trust the email enough to just open it...not without making sure it was safe enough. Opening a virtual machine, she transferred the email there and opened the pdf.
She already expected to see the usual malware message but to her surprise, there was none. Not a single ransom note or taunting message, only a professionally compiled vulnerability report.
One so comprehensive that it could be presented to non-technical board members, and they would easily understand.
Her eyes widened by the second as she read through the report.
"This-" If everything written in this report was true, then Google was sitting on a goddamn ticking time bomb.
But she had to make sure first.
Opening Google's backend with her admin credentials, she started scanning each vulnerability that was pointed out in the report.
Starting with the low threat ones, since the others marked as higher required her entire team.
Running a full scan on the first listed vulnerability, Amelia watched the terminal fill with lines of code and diagnostic feedback.
"Come on… show me something," she muttered.
Barely a minute passed before her screen flagged a confirmation—the flaw was real.
A minor but highly exploitable misconfiguration in their authentication protocols. Something that should've been patched over a year ago.
Her jaw tightened.
She jumped to the second, and then the third.
Confirmed. Confirmed.
This.. this information was basically a gold mine for any hacker as each could go for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in the black market.
After all, this wasn't just any system—this was a potential backdoor into Google's core infrastructure.
The Google.
A hundred billion dollar company. A single exploit gained by hackers against a company like that could be worth a fortune.
Picking her phone up, a Google Nexus one, she scrolled through her contact list until she came across a name,
Alex Warner.
Amelia hesitated for only a second before tapping his name and hitting "Call."
The phone rang twice before a groggy voice came through. "You do realize it's 4:46 in the morning?"
Amelia didn't waste time. "Check your email. I'm forwarding something to you right now. Priority one."
There was a pause on the other end, the kind that comes when someone is rapidly switching gears from sleep mode to incident-response mode.
"Is it another zero-day?"
"Twenty," Amelia replied. "From an entity calling itself OmniTech. I've verified three already. They're real."
"Shit," Ethan muttered. "You sure it's not a decoy?"
"Clean as a whistle. It's just pure documentation and it's the most professional vulnerability report I've seen outside of a paid audit." She informed him as she clicked forward and typed in his email address.
"I'm sending it now."
"You think I'm new at this?" Alex replied, the grogginess in his voice already gone. He was awake now—fully. "Alright, give me a minute. I'll spin up a secure environment."
While she waited, Amelia paced the room. OmniTech clearly wasn't just some good Samaritan since they held back fifteen more vulnerabilities.
But if they only wanted money then they would've used the bounty program to submit all twenty.
If the other fifteen were as high threat as these, then Google paying them millions wasn't a stretch.
Or better yet, they would've sold it at the black market, gaining a lot more than Google would've offered.
But they did not, instead they chose to directly contact her, someone with enough clearance to verify the vulnerabilities.
That meant one thing, OmniTech wanted Google's attention and they had definitely gotten it... at least hers anyway.
"God damnit" a couple of minutes later, Alex's voice came through again.
"Exactly" Amelia said, "I'll need you to assemble the team and check out the other two, I'll get in touch with this OmniTech."
"Right away," Alex said and Amelia ended the call soon after.
She then turned to her screen and immediately started composing an email for OmniTech.
Normally, this decision was for a higher up but she was sure that her actions would be excused after they see the vulnerability report and the potential loss it could cause.