They claimed their internal trading system had a vulnerability, causing some client data to be lost.
They had found several technicians who couldn’t completely fix it, and fearing it would affect the company’s reputation, they didn’t dare to make a fuss.
Through some connections, they found her, offering two thousand U.S.
dollars, cash settlement, provided she could fix it before they got off work today.
Mio stared at the email for two minutes and quickly checked the company’s business registration information.
It was legitimately registered with no abnormal records.
The address was in a Grade A office building in Midtown Manhattan—not some strange place, and certainly not a lawless place like Hells Kitchen.
Two thousand U.S.
dollars to just fix a trading system vulnerability; for her, it was only half an hour’s work—a sure profit.
Besides, a legitimate company in a busy office building shouldn’t have any accidents.
Mio replied to confirm, then shouldered her backpack and took the subway to Manhattan.
The office building was even more impressive than she had imagined.
The receptionist verified her appointment information and politely led her to the technical department upstairs.
The office was open-plan, with people coming and going in cubicles and the sound of typing rising and falling; it looked no different from an ordinary financial company.
Her contact was the technical department supervisor, a middle-aged man wearing glasses.
He led her to the server room with a worried look: “Young lady, our system was hacked three days ago.
The core trading module had problems, and some client data was lost.
We’ve had several groups try to fix it, but they couldn’t, only managing to recover a part of it.
If you can fix it, you’ll get every cent of the money.” “Let me take a look first.” Mio put down her backpack, sat down in front of the server terminal, and plugged in her portable device.
As she had expected, the problem wasn’t complicated.
The backdoor left by the hacker wasn’t sophisticated; it just destroyed the database’s index structure, causing the data chain to break.
Ordinary programmers couldn’t find the broken nodes, so naturally, they couldn’t recover it.
For her, it was just a matter of tracing the code flow.
Her fingertips flew across the keyboard.
Lines of code scrolled across the screen, the broken data chains were pieced back together bit by bit, and the lost client data was completely recovered.
She also easily sealed the backdoor tight.
In just twenty-five minutes, the system was back to normal operation, even running significantly faster than before.
The technical supervisor watched the fully restored system, his eyes wide.
He kept saying “amazing” and handed her the envelope containing the cash on the spot.
Mio took the envelope, squeezed it to confirm the thickness was correct, and shoved it into her backpack.
Just as she was about to pack up and leave, her fingertips suddenly paused.
Her consciousness swept through the bottom layer of the system.
In the deepest hidden partition, she found a string of extremely covert code.
It wasn’t left by the hacker from earlier, but had been embedded much earlier.
The encryption method was extremely special, bearing Military-level permission markers, along with a string of unfamiliar but clearly exclusive encryption sequences belonging to S.H.I.E.L.D.
This company had a connection to S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Mio’s heart instantly skipped a beat.
Her fingertips tapped the keyboard calmly, instantly wiping all traces of her accessing the hidden partition.
At the same time, she silently activated the Fire Control Radar.
All electronic devices, personnel locations, and weapon signals within a 500-meter radius instantly became clear in her consciousness.
Right at the end of the corridor outside the server room, a signal source lit up.
Wearing a camouflaged encrypted communicator, hiding a standard-issue pistol in a holster, with equipment capable of interfering with conventional surveillance and signal scanning; the steady heartbeat and even breathing indicated a top-trained Agent.
Almost at the same time, the server room door was pushed open.
A woman in a black professional suit walked in.
Her reddish-brown curly hair was impeccably groomed, her makeup was exquisite, and she was tall.
She wore high heels, walked without making a sound, held a cup of coffee, and wore an elegant, appropriate smile, looking just like an executive in the company.
But in Mio’s consciousness, her weapons and communicator were clearly marked, as well as that face she had seen countless times in movies—Natasha Romanoff, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Black Widow, one of the World’s top Agents.
Mio’s fingertips tightened slightly, but she remained calm on the surface, still sitting in the chair, slowly packing up her portable device, as if she were just an ordinary student who had finished fixing a computer and was preparing to leave.