"Yes." Sheffield was taken aback at first at Evelyn's initiative to hug him. Then he wrapped his arms around her.

After a while, she said, "Nothing. I'm going to take a shower." Evelyn let go of him.

Sheffield nodded and asked, “Where is your computer?"

“Why?" Evelyn looked at him in confusion.

“When Hilton Group installed an anti-virus system, didn't you install it on your Laptop?"

“No. I only use this laptop at home." She had stored a lot of important documents on the Laptop, so she seldom used it in the office, let alone allow anyone else touch it.

"I can make this thing hack-proof. I wrote a batch file that runs all these little programs. They do things like erasing your web history, identifying keyloggers, disabling ‘Run as Administrator’ vulnerabilities, removing malware and adware that your antivirus missed, and give you real-time protection. Rootkits, viruses, worms, spyware, adware, trojans-all of that will be a thing of the past. It even detects weird network activity and throws the hacker into a virtual sandbox. He may think he's doing something, but it's all fake.

I also got ahold of something called HIPS which does a Lot of the heavy

Lifting."

“It can catch hacker attacks?" asked Evelyn.

“Of course. As well as everything else I mentioned. The main problem for a lot of these more traditional antivirus programs is that the virus is constantly changing. But heuristic analysis as well as the virtual sandbox and network monitoring takes care of all that. HIPS is a lifesaver."

“Where did you get that?"

“l. it doesn't matter. Grab a shower first. I'll help you install it." He saw the leery look on her face.

"You don't want me to see what's on your computer? You hiding something?" He was teasing her on purpose.

Evelyn shook her head. After a while, she went to fetch the Laptop.

"Be careful. I got a virus pretty quick. There's a lot of important stuff on there."

Sheffield nodded and took out an item from his pocket. It Looked like a

USB flash drive, but that wasn't quite what it was. It had a small box at the end of it. He plugged it into one of the USB slots, and it lit up.

Despite her confusion, Evelyn left for the bathroom.

The moment he opened Evelyn's laptop, he felt something was wrong. He tried to call her over, but to his surprise, she was already in the bathroom. He used some of his tools to go snooping and found someone had already hacked in.

The hacker was good. He left few traces. Evelyn wouldn't have even known the guy was there.

But Sheffield knew what was going on as he ran his batch file. Someone had made an incoming connection, and that wasn't in her trusted connections list.

He opened his portable drive and brought out an app to do Deep Packet

Inspection (DPI), and in particular, Encrypted Traffic Intelligence

That would do the busy work, and separate connections into different categories-he could even find someone using a VPN. He also threw up a stealth app to mask his own activity, in case the hacker decided to come after him directly.