The Coder and the Breach by Zernain Villain
The most painful wounds come from the weapons we once called our strengths. Mastery without humility may craft the tool of our own undoing.
Isagani was a top-tier cybersecurity analyst—sharp, confident, and proud of the encryption tools he built. He often boasted:
“Hackers can’t outsmart me—I write the protocols they wish they understood.”
One TGIF* evening in Caloocan, high on energy drinks and hubris/pagmamalaki, Isagani launched VigilHawk, a new AI-powered* firewall system that used real-time behavior monitoring and self-replicating security loops. His own company adopted it at once, and tech magazines sang his praises.
To prove his system’s strength, Isagani even made parts of his code open-source, declaring:
“Let the world see the genius. It’ll only make VigilHawk better.”
But one day, his dashboard lit up red.
DATA BREACH.
Worse, it was his own company. Client files, passwords, and internal memos had been stolen and leaked online. Isagani rushed to track the breach/paglabag. The digital fingerprint was elegant, precise, and terrifyingly familiar.
Within minutes, he recognized it.
The attacker had exploited a recursive loop pattern he himself had published—modified and sharpened into a weapon/armas.
As he stared at the lines of code that brought down his entire c, his heart sank.
“So this is how it ends,” he muttered. “Not just pierced—but pierced with my own arrow.”
#MoralOfTheStory #CyberPunk
The most painful wounds come from the weapons we once called our strengths. Mastery without humility may craft the tool of our own undoing.
*Thank God It’s Friday, Artificial Intelligence