Green Means Segmentation

Wednesday, 2:47pm

BACKUP_01 stood in its own rack, at the far end of the server room, connected with a green cable instead of the usual yellow one. Separate, that was how everyone at Nordvik Polymers described it, matching how they responded in audits and insurance questionnaires. The visitors didn’t see the differently colored cable and examined it anyway.

The rack and the cable might be separate, but BACKUP_01 was joined to the same identity environment as everything else. After a few quick keystrokes, the server responded to the credentials the visitors had been holding since line 12 of the printer script.

To its credit, the backup system tried to communicate and sent status reports to a dedicated mailbox. The mailbox belonged to an employee who had left a year earlier. Nothing bounced. Nothing was read.

The system itself was solid, because Mats, the previous infrastructure engineer, had built it. He was good at what he did. He was methodical, kept notes on the smallest technical details, and told everyone that he and his smartphone had a photographic memory. His departure the week before had left loose ends and added even more pressure to the few people left in the IT department.

Finding someone to ease that workload had been on Petra’s to-do list for quite some time, along with everything else, like ill-behaved printers. There was always an excuse from upstairs for why she couldn’t. Sometimes it was as if they didn’t think the IT department was important. Petra sighed. “It’s just the way it is,” she told herself.

The visitors quietly added BACKUP_01 to their notes. As professionals, they intended to save this little sweet, wrapped in golden paper, for last.

They did not encrypt it. Not yet.