The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

Three o'clock in the morning.

The central air conditioning in the Binjiang Industrial Park has been shut down.

The air was murky, carrying the musty smell of old carpet dust.

Just as Lin Che closed his laptop, a red alert popped up in the lower right corner of the screen.

It is an external monitoring terminal that is privately installed on Alibaba Cloud.

[WARNING: CPU load 100%]

[WARNING: Database connection pool overflow]

[WARNING: Server response timed out]

That cheap single-core server melted.

Lin Che underestimated "greed".

Millions of "junk users" abandoned by Alibaba erupted over a five-yuan red envelope.

Click requests were like a tsunami, smashing this small, dilapidated boat that had been rented for a few hundred dollars.

Without expanding storage, the app crashes.

The five million users who had just gathered together would instantly turn into five million rioters because of the inability to withdraw their funds.

Lin Che opened the Alibaba Cloud purchase page.

Enterprise verification and bank transfer can be completed in as little as two business days.

It's too late.

My gaze shifted to the Alibaba internal network backend on the left side of the screen.

There lies a sleeping behemoth—the "Double Eleven High-Voltage Backup Cluster".

Thousands of top-of-the-line servers are in "standby" mode.

The fan is idling at low speed, waiting for the celebration seven months later.

This is Li Mo's political achievement project, designed to deal with a nuclear arsenal capable of handling tens of thousands of concurrent attacks per second.

Now, this sledgehammer is just right for killing a nut.

Lin Che tapped his fingers on the keyboard.

Without hesitation. Without trembling.

He wrote a script called System_Stress_Test_V4.0.sh.

Its sole purpose is to disguise the real-time traffic of "micro-group buying" as "end-to-end stress test data packets" and forcibly inject them into the backup cluster through the backdoor.

Press Enter.

The screen is flickering.

On the monitoring terminal, the glaring red "Down" indicator changed to a green "Running" indicator.

The CPU utilization chart plummeted from 100%.

90%... 50%... 10%...

It stopped at 0.1%.

For this top-tier cluster, millions of concurrent users are like a drop of ink falling into the Pacific Ocean.

It was diluted to the point of disappearing without a trace.

Lin Che picked up the ice-cold bottled water on the table and took a sip.

Through the glass wall, the indicator lights in the server room flashed rhythmically.

A pale blue light shone on his face.

Alibaba's electricity costs, Alibaba's servers, Alibaba's bandwidth.

They are doing everything they can to provide financial support to Alibaba's arch-rival.

Everything was quiet.

The only sound was the soft sound of the hard drive reading and writing, as delicate as silkworms eating mulberry leaves.

.........

At the same time.

Shenzhen, Nanshan District.

The Tencent building was brightly lit.

In the WeChat Business Group's security center, a huge monitoring screen illuminated the room in a bright red light.

That was a map of China.

A red patch has appeared in the Midwest.

Abnormal traffic warning color.

"Inducing sharing".

The on-duty security engineer made a judgment and swiped the mouse to the red button in the lower right corner of the console—[Block (domain name blocking)].

"Thousands of these spam links are blocked every night. They're either selling fake medicine or running pyramid schemes."

Hover your index finger over the left mouse button.

"etc."

A hand reached out and blocked the mouse.

The senior manager in charge of strategic analysis scratched his fingernail across the table, leaving a white mark.

"Don't seal it off."

The analyst pointed to the value in the upper right corner of the screen, "Look at the K factor."

The engineer was taken aback and looked up.

K-Factor (Virus Transmission Coefficient): 3.5.

This means that each user brings in an average of 3.5 new users.

Harassing links are usually below 0.1. Top-tier viral H5 pages that reach 1.5 are considered masterpieces.

3.5.

This is fission. This is a nuclear explosion.

"This is not garbage."

The analyst's voice was dry.

He walked to the big screen and looked at the red spots, which resembled bacteria, spreading from the outskirts of fourth- and fifth-tier cities to the centers of first- and second-tier cities.

Outside the window, traffic flows endlessly on Shennan Avenue.

Inside the window, the screen's curves are challenging Tencent's social moat.

"Check domain name registration."

"Can't find it." The engineer typed. "It went through more than a dozen layers of shells, finally pointing to an offshore company. But the server IP..."

The engineer paused.

Looking back at the analyst, his eyes held a strange expression.

"The IP range belongs to Alibaba's Binjiang Park."

The analyst squinted.

"Someone from Alibaba? Using WeChat for social media viral marketing?"

He took out his phone and took a picture of the astonishing K-factor value.

"interesting."

The photo was sent to a WeChat group called "General Office Strategic Report".

"Don't do anything yet. Give it some flow; I want to see just how big this thing can grow."

.........

The next morning.

Alibaba Binjiang Campus, N4 floor.

Lin Che had just sat down.

"Who's running the script?!"

A roar came from the corridor.

Old Zhang from the operations department strode along, his face dark, clutching a traffic monitoring report.

Several P6 engineers nearby shrank back, pretending to fix bugs.

Old Zhang walked to Lin Che's workstation and placed the monitor on the keyboard.

"The backup cluster for Singles' Day experienced abnormal load fluctuations at 3 AM. The port points to your employee ID."

Spit sprayed onto Lin Che's monitor.

"Who gave you the authority to tamper with things?"

Lin Che did not stand up.

Pull out a tissue and wipe the saliva off the screen.

From left to right, until the screen is clean again.

"Since Brother Zhang has found out, just say so."

Lin Che turned on his computer and retrieved the document from the encrypted folder—"Application for Conducting Antifragile Extreme Stress Testing".

"I'm doing a grayscale test."

"Grayscale my ass!" Old Zhang pointed at the monitoring report. "What test mobilized two thousand servers? And it was all external network traffic?"

"Zombie Network Attack Simulation"

Lin Che turned the screen towards Lao Zhang.

On the screen, the load curve was incredibly smooth—that was flattened using Alibaba's computing power.

"Brother Zhang, look at this concurrency level. If it were a real hacker, the payment interface would have crashed long ago with last night's gateway configuration."

Lin Che's voice was very steady.

"I was simulating an extreme DDoS attack, and as you can see, the load balancing strategy has a vulnerability, with a response latency exceeding 20 milliseconds."

Old Zhang was stunned.

Staring at the curve, his professional instincts instantly calmed him down.

20 milliseconds latency.

Normally it wouldn't seem like much, but at midnight on Singles' Day, it means the loss of hundreds of millions of orders.

The anger subsided, leaving only a solemn focus on the technical details.

"Why make such a big fuss without following the proper procedures?" Old Zhang's tone softened as he pulled over a chair and sat down.

"The process will take two weeks."

Lin Che looked into Lao Zhang's eyes, "Hackers don't send emails to request permission before launching an attack."

Old Zhang remained silent.

With a technical background, I find administrative procedures the most annoying.

Lin Che hit his weak spot.

"Say hello next time."

Old Zhang took the surveillance report back, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the wastepaper basket.

"It's just that if I'm on duty and the internal auditors take over, you'll be in for a lot of trouble."

He got up and glanced at the computer case at Lin Che's feet before leaving.

"Don't point the air vents at the wall, it will hinder heat dissipation."

Old Zhang bent down and helped Lin Che move the computer case, adjusting the ventilation angle.

"Thanks, Brother Zhang."

Lin Che watched Old Zhang's retreating figure.

Wearing a plaid shirt, his back was slightly hunched.

Occupational diseases resulting from long-term server hosting.

Lin Che withdrew his gaze.

Open your email.

There's an unread email in my inbox.

From: Tencent Investment Department

Admission ticket.

Server set up, follow up and get it.

Now, go to Shenzhen and sell this "unicorn" that only exists in data for a good price.