Film and Television: My Cheat Code is AI

Under Shen Lan's guidance, Zhang Yang completely upgraded the computer's system. He also had the floppy disk given to him by the mysterious young man in his backpack, which could unlock the so-called master disk's password. However, what Zhang Yang needed wasn't the master disk itself. Gao Jun was the plate maker behind it all, and as long as Gao Jun didn't appear, Zhang Yang couldn't get them to close the net.

An excellent plate maker is no less than a top-notch painter. When Zhang Yang was in contact with the people around Gao Jun, he did not find out who the plate maker was.

It was already dark and Gao Jun still hadn't arrived. When Zhang Yang was about to go out, he found two bodyguards standing at the door.

"Mr. Zhang, I'm sorry to trouble you, you can't go out."

Zhang Yang said, "You've taken my phone too, and you won't let me out? Where's General Manager Gao?"

The bodyguard said, "Mr. Gao has his own arrangements, please be patient."

Zhang Yang nodded and said, "Okay, bring me some food, preferably beef noodles, and a few skewers of kidney and grilled meat."

"Yes, we'll go buy it right away."

peripheral.

Old Zheng was sitting in the command vehicle, along with Qin Liguo and Director Ma.

Old Zheng said, "Captain Qin, Director Ma, and Zhang Yang have all been in there for a long time. Has something happened to them? Should we close the net?"

Qin Liguo shook his head and said, "No, I trust Zhang Yang. There wasn't much noise inside." Before he finished speaking, the walkie-talkie crackled to life: "Number one, number one, someone drove out."

Old Zheng said, "Follow along, don't wake them up."

"Yes."

Half an hour later, the walkie-talkie crackled to life: "Someone went and bought beef noodles, kidneys, and grilled meat."

Qin Liguo said with a smile, "This kid is eating quite well inside."

Old Zheng said into the walkie-talkie, "Roger that, keep watch."

"Yes"

Director Ma also said, "Alright, this proves that Zhang Yang is still safe. Let's wait for their news."

Just then, Qin Liguo's phone rang. After answering the call, Qin Liguo frowned and said after hanging up, "Something's happened."

Director Ma asked, "What's going on?"

Qin Liguo said, "A batch of unidentified funds suddenly arrived in Hong Kong, amounting to approximately US$1.2 billion. The National Security Bureau and the Financial Services Office have traced the network address to our location, and we need the assistance of the General Team in the investigation."

Director Ma thought for a moment and said, "Captain Qin, we can't let them get involved in this matter, or things will get chaotic. Our top priority is to contact the authorities."

Qin Liguo said, "Now we can only rely on Zhang Yang to contact us."

Zhang Yang sat at the table, eating beef noodles and drinking cola with relish. His mind was still preoccupied with how to contact the outside world. Although there were no security cameras, he suspected there were listening devices or something similar, and bodyguards were watching the door.

After eating and drinking his fill, he sat in front of the computer and began to ask questions in his mind.

"Deep Blue, I need to contact the outside world. Could you create a virtual phone number so I can send and receive text messages?"

[Analyzing...]

Unexpectedly, Gao Jun suddenly arrived at this moment, walking in with a grin and saying, "Little brother, are you full yet?"

Zhang Yang smiled and nodded, saying, "The noodles here are pretty good. Mr. Gao, you can try them sometime."

Gao Jun said with a smile, "I still prefer steak. This kind of food has too many carcinogens."

Zhang Yang just smiled and didn't say anything. Gao Jun continued, "The master disk will arrive soon. The hardware encryption has been decrypted. The next step is up to you, brother."

Zhang Yang said, "No problem, Mr. Gao. I guarantee I can decrypt it for you within three days. But I can't contact the outside world now, right? You know I'm carrying some burdens, so I need to stay in touch with the outside world."

Gao Jun shook his head and said, "Brother, you know that the business I do involves matters of life and death, so I really can't contact the outside world. As long as you successfully decipher the code, I'll immediately send someone to send you back."

Zhang Yang had no choice but to say, "Let's leave it at that for now."

When Gao Jun pushed the door open and came in, Zhang Yang was leaning back in his chair, twirling a pen in his hand. Gao Jun was holding a black hard drive case. He walked to the workbench and placed the case on the table.

"Brother, it's up to you now."

Zhang Yang took the hard drive enclosure and opened it. Inside was a 3.5-inch hard drive with no brand markings on the casing, only a handwritten serial number. He took the hard drive out of the enclosure, flipped it over, and checked the interface: a SCSI interface, 80-pin, which matched the expansion card in his Dell workstation perfectly.

"Leave it to me," he said.

Gao Jun showed no sign of leaving. He stood there for a while, hands in his pockets, watching Zhang Yang connect the hard drive to the SCSI port on the back of the workstation, tighten the screws on both sides of the port, connect the cable, power on, and boot into the system. The hard drive was recognized as an unformatted volume in Device Manager. The system automatically prompted him to initialize the disk. He closed the prompt, opened Disk Management, and glanced at the disk status—capacity 74GB, file system custom format, neither NTFS nor FAT32, only one partition, and the partition table was encrypted.

He double-clicked the drive letter, and a dialog box popped up: Please enter the password. Below was an input box with no instructions on the number of characters or format. He typed a few letters randomly, the screen flashed, and a new message appeared: Incorrect password. Remaining attempts: Two.

Zhang Yang immediately stopped. This disk was set with a one-time self-destruct mechanism; three incorrect inputs could automatically erase or lock the data. He and Gao Jun exchanged a glance. Gao Jun shrugged, as if to say: If I could unlock it, would I be asking you?

Zhang Yang didn't say anything. He got up and walked to the cabinet next to him. There were several boxes of floppy disks in the cabinet, arranged in a row by date. Each floppy disk had a label with a number written on it with a marker. He flipped to the latest one, which he had put in this morning. This disk was from the mysterious person and contained a special decryption tool.

He inserted the floppy disk into the floppy drive and copied the program onto the local hard drive. This tool was not one of the general decryption software available on the market; it was written specifically for a custom encryption format for the SCSI interface. The interface was very rudimentary, consisting of a command-line window with three options: mirror, brute force, and dictionary.

Zhang Yang first selected the image file, and the program began cloning the hard drive sector by sector. The progress bar moved forward step by step, and after nearly an hour, the cloning was complete. He unplugged the original disk, locked it in the cabinet, and left only the image file on his local machine.

He then created a sandbox environment on a machine without internet access. The virtual machine was pre-installed with Windows 2000, but no other software was installed, and the network card was permanently disabled. He mounted the image file into the virtual machine and copied the decryption program from a floppy disk into the virtual machine. All these operations were performed locally, without going through any network.

After the program started, he selected the brute-force mode, and a prompt appeared on the screen: Password length: 32 characters. Character set: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, special symbols. Estimated time may vary depending on hardware configuration.

Zhang Yang set the decryption parameters, clicked start, and the program began running. The CPU usage jumped to 100%, the cooling fan in the computer case whirred, and on the screen, the first character began to flash one by one. Each character only stayed on the screen for a fraction of a second before moving on. Letter A, letter B, letter C, one by one, were tried. After running through all the character sets, the first character stopped at the letter G, and then the second character started running. The same process was repeated, trying one character at a time.

The program ran for an hour, solving the second digit. After the second hour, it solved the third digit. Gao Jun left and didn't come back in. Zhang Yang went to the restroom and glanced at the screen when he returned. The third digit of the password had been located at the number 7, and the program was working on the fourth digit.

The 32-bit password is divided into four 8-bit segments, each to be cracked independently. At the current rate, cracking one 8-bit segment takes approximately four hours, and cracking all four segments would take at least sixteen hours.

Including the time spent merging segments, the total time would probably be around twenty hours. Zhang Yang noted down the current progress and time in his logbook, then reclined the chair back halfway, closed his eyes, and began to rest. The screen saver on the Sun workstation next to him had already started, and several fish were slowly swimming back and forth on the screen.