POV: Mark Müller
Monday morning. The office air was thick with stale coffee and recycled air, the fluorescent lights already too bright for Mark Müller's tired eyes. As the head of IT at FalkenBank's Frankfurt branch, he'd long since made peace with the soul-numbing ritual of Monday mornings: boot the terminal, sip terrible vending machine coffee, and triage the flood of emails before anything caught fire.
He dropped into his chair with the same resigned grunt as always and began clicking through his inbox.
Spam. Auto-generated tickets. Budget whining. Department updates. Junk.
He was halfway through flagging a suspicious mail for deletion when a forwarded message from one of his junior sysadmins caught his eye. The subject line was cold, clean.
Subject: Critical Security Flaws in Customer Portal
His hand hovered over the mouse. Normally, something like this would get ignored — another freelance pen-tester fishing for a contract, another half-baked vulnerability claim.
But the email was polite. Short. No threats. No sales pitch.
Curious, Mark clicked it open.
Sender: M. Wintershade. No affiliation. No company signature. Just a name. Attached: a sample vulnerability report.
He opened the file.
Immediately, his eyes narrowed. The language was precise. The documentation style was old-school but sharp, packed with diagrams, line references, code snippets, and cross-referenced CVE formats.
By the time he finished the second page, his pulse had picked up. This wasn't a prank. This wasn't a script kiddie with delusions of grandeur. Whoever this Wintershade was, they were a ghost — and they knew exactly what they were doing.
He checked the sender domain. Disposable, but not blacklisted. The attachment had passed virus scans. No indication of tampering.
Still, he ran it through a sandbox. Nothing malicious. Just raw data.
Mark sat back and blew out a long breath. Then he called for an emergency Level 3 support meeting.
By 10:15 AM, the entire upper-tier sysadmin team was packed into the conference room. Chairs scraped, coffee spilled, keyboards clacked.
Mark projected the report on the screen. "Everyone, eyes up. This was submitted by an unknown party this morning. Claims to be a preview — just ten percent of a larger vulnerability analysis. We're going to validate it in real time."
Some of the younger staff exchanged skeptical glances. One of them — Salim — spoke first.
"We get a lot of this stuff, boss. What's different this time?"
"Start running the tests. Form injection exploit on page one. Go."
A silence fell as the room filled with the soft tapping of keys.
Ten minutes.
Then Salim looked up. His face had gone pale.
"Confirmed. Full access breach is replicable. Works on current deployment."
Another voice chimed in. "The admin panel token relay on page three? That's live too. It bypasses MFA completely."
"And the mobile session hijack? Valid. Very easy to exploit."
Mark rubbed his temples. This wasn't just an exposure — this was a knife to the artery.
"Status on updates and patching?" he asked quietly.
"Everything's current. No backlog. All latest patches applied," Salim said. "This isn't negligence. These are zero-days — or they're leveraging logic flaws we didn't even see as risks."
Mark nodded grimly. "Okay. We fix what we can now. Patch everything per their instructions. Document every change. And someone call legal — we might be dealing with something sensitive."
He stepped out of the room and called Michael Weber, their CTO.
"Michael, we've got a situation. Someone just handed us a bomb and defused it for us — or part of it. It's only ten percent of the total report. The vulnerabilities are real, and they're ugly."
He paused, listening.
"No, not a firm. Some individual. Calls themselves M. Wintershade. We have no record of them. No contract. No past interaction. They're offering to sell us the full report."
Another pause. A low breath on the line.
"Get them in. Be respectful. Make an offer. We need that data, and we don't want them selling it somewhere else."
"Understood," Mark said, ending the call.
He returned to his office, sat down, and began drafting an email.
POV: Max
I was dead on my feet when I left the café. The afternoon sun was too bright, the city too loud. Everything felt numb. Just another shift, another handful of tips, another few hours clawed out of an endless week.
I was halfway to the train station when my phone buzzed.
I checked the screen. Email.
From: Mark Müller
Subject: Request for Meeting: Security Findings
My heart skipped.
I ducked into a corner near a building wall and opened the message.
It was… professional. Ridiculously professional. Calm. Cordial. Like something out of a high-level negotiation.
They wanted to meet.
FalkenBank. Tomorrow. After my shift. To discuss the rest of the vulnerability report.
I reread the message three times. No threats. No demands. They didn't seem angry. If anything, they were intrigued. Maybe even impressed.
A part of me wanted to scream with relief. Another part clenched tight with anxiety.
What if they were setting me up? What if this was a trap?
But no. It didn't read like a trap. It read like an opportunity. A real one.
I hit reply. Confirmed the time. Told them I'd be there.
Then I lowered the phone and stood in silence.
Something about this moment felt huge. Like a door had just cracked open into a future I hadn't even dared to imagine.
And all I had to do was walk through it.