The Cyber Attack Training

Alisia sat at her desk, the hum of the computers around her blending into the background noise of the office. The sun streamed in through the large windows of the company's sleek, modern workspace. It had been two months since she started at Ethan's company, and while her personal life weighed heavily on her mind—especially after discovering the dark truth behind her brother's death—she had no choice but to keep moving forward.

Her job had been a welcome distraction. It gave her something to focus on, something tangible to sink her mind into. Yet, in the back of her head, the discovery from David's laptop lingered like a shadow she couldn't escape. The gang, the corruption, the evidence she had—none of it could be acted upon yet. For now, she needed to play it smart. She needed time.

In those two months, her work at the company had taught her more than she had ever imagined. She had expected her role to be focused on defense—on protecting systems from cyber attacks, building robust security architectures to keep hackers at bay. But to her surprise, the company had emphasized offensive strategies. Her supervisors were adamant that understanding how to attack a system was key to being able to defend one. If you could think like an attacker, you could anticipate their moves and stop them before they breached your defenses.

It was an uncomfortable shift in perspective. She had always thought of cybersecurity as a shield, a wall to protect people from harm. But here, they were teaching her how to break those walls down, how to tear systems apart from the inside.

"Remember," her senior mentor had told her on the first day of attack-focused training, "to defend well, you have to know how to attack. You need to get into the mind of a hacker."

And so she had. Day by day, Alisia had been diving into the world of attacks—penetration testing, exploiting vulnerabilities, finding weaknesses in networks, and breaking through firewalls. They started small: a test environment, isolated from the rest of the company, filled with dummy websites and mock databases. The first few weeks were about finding flaws in outdated software or improperly configured systems. She quickly learned how easy it was to slip past weak defenses if you knew where to look.

At first, the process felt sterile—like an academic exercise. But soon, as the weeks passed, she started to feel the thrill of it. The adrenaline rush of breaking through security measures, the satisfaction of finding the perfect exploit that let her slip past unnoticed. She could see why hackers did it—not just for money, but for the sheer challenge, the game of it.

There was one day that stood out in her mind. It had been mid-afternoon, just before a lunch break. Her supervisor had dropped a fresh set of test data in front of her—a particularly tricky network setup that was supposed to simulate a high-security financial system. Her task was simple: find a way in.

Alisia had stared at the screen for a while, running through her options. This system was robust, much more complex than the dummy sites she had worked on before. There were layers of encryption, multiple firewalls, and a particularly well-hidden database that was meant to be the crown jewel of the setup. But Alisia had learned a few tricks by then, and she knew what to look for.

Within an hour, she had managed to find a small crack in the encryption protocol—something so minor that most defenders wouldn't even notice it. It was a flaw in the system's handshake, the initial exchange between two computers that sets up an encrypted connection. It was almost unnoticeable, but once she found it, everything else fell into place.

She exploited it, gaining access to the deeper parts of the system. Within another thirty minutes, she had control of the database. She had done it—broken into what was supposed to be an impenetrable system.

Her supervisor had been impressed. "You're getting better at this," he had said, nodding his approval. "Keep that up, and you'll be ready for the real stuff soon."

But that moment, that sense of accomplishment, had been bittersweet. As she sat there, staring at the cracked system in front of her, she couldn't help but think of how easily it could have been real. How many times had people like her—people with knowledge like hers—been on the other side, using these skills to hurt people, to steal from them, to destroy lives?

It wasn't just a game anymore.

As the weeks rolled on, the training continued. The company's focus on attack strategies didn't relent. They drilled her on everything from phishing attacks to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, teaching her how to overload systems until they collapsed. They taught her about malware—how hackers could plant malicious software in seemingly innocent files, how they could gain control of an entire network by exploiting a single weak link.

There was one day when they showed her a type of ransomware attack. It was simple in execution but devastating in impact. A single click on a bad link, and suddenly a company's entire database could be encrypted and held hostage. Seeing how easily it could be done had shaken her. If she had learned anything, it was that the difference between safety and vulnerability was often just one small mistake, one overlooked detail.

They made her practice over and over again, attacking from different angles, finding ways to exploit the smallest cracks. Every day, she was forced to think like a hacker, to be a hacker. And she was good at it. Too good.

But the more she learned, the more uneasy she became. Alisia had joined the cybersecurity world to protect people, to stop the kind of chaos she had uncovered on David's laptop. And yet, every day, she was being taught how to create that chaos. It was all for the sake of defense, she told herself. You had to know how to destroy something to learn how to protect it. That's what they kept saying.

Still, it was hard not to feel like she was walking a dangerous line.

As the two months drew to a close, Alisia had become proficient in a variety of attacks. She could hack into a system, steal data, plant malware, and even disrupt a network entirely if she needed to. But with that power came responsibility—a responsibility that weighed heavier on her with every new skill she learned.

Her company focused on red team testing—essentially acting as the attackers to expose vulnerabilities in their clients' systems. They said it was necessary, that no one could truly protect a system without knowing how it could be breached. And she believed them. But at night, when the office was quiet, and she was left alone with her thoughts, she couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right.

Even Ethan's occasional visits to the office, where he would check in on her progress, didn't help to quell the growing unease. His praise felt hollow, his compliments too smooth, as if he was always calculating something behind those charming smiles. But she didn't have a choice. She had already signed the contract. She had to see this through.

One afternoon, as she sat at her desk, Alisia caught a glimpse of an encrypted file on her own laptop—a reminder of David's investigation. It was still there, waiting for her to dive deeper into the dark world that had taken her brother from her. She hadn't touched it since that day she found the file. There had been too much else to focus on. But soon… soon, she would have to confront it again.

For now, she had to focus on mastering her work. Because if there was one thing she had learned in these two months, it was that knowing how to attack wasn't just about systems or networks.

It was about survival.

And she needed to survive.