All in a Night's Request

Friday, 2:13am

Nobody at Nordvik Polymers was awake to notice, which was fine since there was nothing to notice yet.

An automated scanner on the other side of the world reached the company’s public IP address. It wasn’t looking at Nordvik specifically. Through random tries, it was looking at everyone, everywhere for anything.

Most of the requests failed. The firewall dropped them without comment. A web server returned a standard error page. For a few seconds, it looked like the company was a tight-shut fortress. Then the scanner hit an old, forgotten remote-access service.

It had been set up years earlier, during Covid-19, so that people could work from home. That night, it answered the same way as back then, with a login page and, somewhere behind that, its name and version.

The software version was just a few months out of date. The scanner noted the version, filed it away, and moved on to the next IP address in line. Somewhere, a database of interesting findings grew one row longer.

Inside Nordvik’s server room, the monitoring platform dutifully observed all of this, logging each step of the scanner along the network’s outer perimeter. It had been purchased three years earlier, after a consultant kept repeating the word “visibility”. It had been configured to record everything.

It had never been configured to tell anyone anything.

The building stayed dark. The log grew quietly. Nobody was watching.

At 2:17am, the scanner stopped.

Seven minutes later, someone logged in.