A/N This is a story I wrote for a short story comp I entered.
R/R Please. XD

Hacked!

The screen suddenly burst into life. Kathryn watched in horror as row upon row of numbers rapidly scrolled in front of her eyes. “What have we done?” she whispered.

“What have we done?” her assistant Shani repeated.

“No!” Kathryn yelled into the silence of the computer lab, “This can’t be happening! We didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Did we just get hacked?”

“Impossible Shani,” Kathryn was near hysterics, “The CIA doesn’t get hacked.”

“I’m sorry Kathryn but apparently it just did.”

“Not helping Shani,” Kathryn said worriedly, “What do we do now?”

“Boot up the main system, if that doesn’t work use the back-up,” Shani was counting the things she had to do on her fingers, “Check whether any files have been sabotaged and try to trace the I.P address of the hackers if they left any trace which they probably did.”

Shani and Kathryn quickly got to work on tracking the hacker.

After hours of working Shani gasped aloud, “I think I found something.”

“What did you find?”

“Someone’s stolen our files on nuclear operations,” Shani was getting more nervous, “You don’t think Russia or China could’ve done it do you?”

“China’s done it before and the MSS and SVR signed a peace treaty in 1992.” Kathryn was worried; this could trigger another cold war.

“We should tell the Director, I do that while you keep working and try to trace the I.P address and find out what files have been stolen.”

Kathryn walked hurriedly out of the room and into the elevator.

“Miss Grace,” the Director tore his eyes away from the file he was holding to look at Kathryn, “You have something to tell me?”

“Sir,” Kathryn began explaining, “We’ve been hacked and whoever it was they stole our files on America’s nuclear operations. We’re tracing the hacker this very minute and we think it may be Russia or China.”

“I sense a ‘but’ here.” the Director interrupted.

“Whoever did it is a pro; it’s going to be hard.” Kathryn explained.

“Thank God for back-up files,” the Director gestured to the numerous filing cabinets in his office, “I want everyone in the cyber crime unit on this.”

“Yes sir.” Kathryn replied before stepping out.

“This is a nightmare.” the Director muttered to himself before dialling the number for the Secretary of State to call a conference.

“Do everything you can to find them,” Kathryn addressed the cyber crime division, “Hell! Hack into their servers even!”

“This is now a matter of National Security, and we don’t want another cold war.” The Director says as an after note.

It had been the longest days of her life but finally Kathryn had found something that successfully traced the hacker to China. They had yet no proof that Russia was involved but a black op that the Navy had been working for the last four months had aroused more suspicion.

They had replaced the missing files and the encryptions were harder to break. Every government agency in the United States had increased the security to make it harder to hack into their networks. It was going to be a long battle but the next time they will be ready.