Drama Queen Reborn as a Top Student!

Chapter 1058 - 528: Genius Hacker

"What PT? I’ve never even heard of this guy. From which godforsaken corner did Ren Mingze dig him up?"

A man’s arrogant, self-satisfied voice came from the computer.

Hongyu smiled. "Whoever has the strongest skills, that’s who you should use, sir. Since you’re not convinced, why don’t you two have a fair match?"

Hongyu looked at the man sitting at the head of the table, silent.

Yu Fusheng nodded without a word.

From the computer, the young man’s proud, confident voice came again: "I won’t lose. Let him come at me with everything he’s got."

Hongyu snapped her fingers. "Good. The rules are: you’ll both run a penetration test on Tianlu Bank’s simulated system. Whoever first gets kernel-level access and retrieves the designated ’Treasure File’ wins."

Mingxi was certain victory was his.

So young and already the White Tiger Captain, unstoppable on the dark web—Mingxi was the so‑called genius hacker everyone talked about.

He couldn’t tolerate anyone acting arrogant in front of him. Today he was determined to give the other guy a life-long lesson, show him what a real genius hacker looks like.

Round one: information gathering. Mingxi used standard tools to scan, probing service versions and the operating system.

On this race-against-time battlefield, a chat window suddenly popped up on his screen.

"Mingxi, give it a rest. The target’s in AWS us-east-1. The frontend’s using Cloudflare for WAF and DDoS mitigation. All the IPs you’re scanning are Anycast addresses, not the real servers."

"You’re trying to brute-force enumerate subdomains of hr.tl-bank.xx to find an admin login panel? I suggest you skip that. It’s a high-interaction honeypot running Kippo. A few more tries and your IP will be tagged and pushed to threat intel platforms."

Reading these lines, Mingxi felt a chill run through him. PT not only knew what he was doing, he knew exactly which tools Mingxi was using and the target’s subtle configurations, as if he was looking at Mingxi’s screen. What a terrifying ’God’s-eye view’ this was.

Mingxi suddenly realized he had underestimated his opponent—a fatal mistake in warfare. He immediately adjusted his mindset, focusing all his attention. Soon he found a seemingly outdated file upload feature on a server in a test environment. He carefully crafted a polyglot file, trying to bypass the upload checks.

PT exploited the exact same vulnerability at the same time—but in a completely different way.

In the chat window, PT’s taunting text kept jabbing at Mingxi’s raw nerves.

"File upload? Interesting. But the exploit you’re using only has a 70% success rate."

PT crushed him with an almost offhand tone: "I’m not using that. I’ve got a zero-day for this file parser."

Sweat started to bead on Mingxi’s forehead. He was now sure he had taken his opponent too lightly.

Zero-days are nuclear weapons in the hacking world—extremely rare and expensive. PT casually said he had one, and then instantly pulled off a successful exploit. That showed resources and technical depth beyond comprehension.

The match was still on; he couldn’t let his guard down. Racking his brains, Mingxi exploited a race condition in kernel space to escalate privileges, trying to get root.

On the other side of the computer, Ren Mingze watched the teenager take a leisurely sip of Coke, then slowly type into the chat window.

"Let’s run sudo -l... Oh, so the www-data user can run a script called /usr/sbin/log_cleaner as root without a password? That’s a terrible config."

"Let’s take a look at this script..."

Bang! A root shell popped straight up on his terminal.

"Living off the Land. Using the system’s own legitimate tools and configs to attack is the most elegant, and the hardest to detect, approach."

Ren Mingze couldn’t see the teenager’s face, but he knew the kid had to be grinning in pure satisfaction right now.

Mingxi had used a complex chain of attacks, while PT had "one-shotted" him with something that looked simple and direct.

PT had gotten root long ago. He watched Mingxi thrash around in kernel modules like a beast trapped in a cage.

When Mingxi, after going through hell and back, was finally about to reach the "Treasure File", he discovered the file was encrypted. He tried brute-forcing it, but there wasn’t a shred of hope.

The few words in the chat window seemed to mock his incompetence: "Don’t bother. The key for that file isn’t stored on the server."

"Then where is it?" Mingxi asked reflexively.

"The key is the SHA256 hash of a particular word on today’s Siland Times front page. I calculated it 24 hours ago."

PT casually typed in a long string of characters, and the file decrypted on cue.

Mingxi completely crashed, shutting down into silence.