Lian picked the phone and dialed a number from a small piece of paper.
Objective One : Map out the clan's employee structure.
Target One. The Reception.
"Good afternoon, White Lotus Headquarters. How may I help you?"
Lian introduced himself as Alan from the Engineering Department.
"Could you connect me to Finance? I need to get an invoice approved."
"Certainly. You can reach Brad at this number."
"Thanks. I also need to get in touch with Accounts. Who handles the employee records?"
"That would be Daniel. Here's his extension."
"Perfect. That's all I needed. Thanks for your help."
"You're welcome. Have a nice day."
The receptionist didn't suspect anything because this is public information inside the headquarters and she gets calls like this every day.
Target two. The Accounts Department.
Lian dialed Daniel's number, posing as Brad from Finance.
"Hey, Daniel. How's it going?"
"Pretty good. You?"
"It's great. I just need a quick favor. Could you check the consultants we hired recently? I got a complaint that one of them was having trouble with their salary, so I just want to make sure their details were filled correctly."
Daniel typed for a few seconds.
"Let's see... The most recent consultant is Roxy. She joined last month, and everything on my end looks correct."
"Perfect. Thanks for checking."
"No problem."
The more Lian made the conversation feel like business as usual, the more he reduced suspicion. When people don't have a reason to be suspicious, it's easy for a person to gain their trust and get the info he wants.
Target Three. Obtaining the Employee Directory.
A few days later...
Lian dialed the Accounts Department once again.
This time, he switched the voice filter from the middle-aged man's voice he had used before to a female voice.
Claiming to be Roxy, he asked if they could send her the latest employee directory.
Daniel apologized and explained that a requisition form had to be submitted before they could process the request.
Lian replied, "I am outside the office on vacation and need this pushed through today — is there any way you could fill the form for me over your end? I can give you everything you need over the phone."
"...Yeah, okay, I can do that. What do you need again?"
"The updated employee directory, current list — and if you could send a hard copy instead of email, that'd be great."
"The clan's policy doesn't allow us to mail these out," Daniel explained. "We can send them by fax if you want."
But fax only works internally which meant Lian has to be inside headquarters to pick it up.
Lian replied calmly, "Send it to reception. I'll pick it up this afternoon."
Lian called the reception again, claiming to be Roxy, and asked if she'd received any fax for her.
The receptionist confirmed that it had arrived.
"I'm unable to come to headquarters," Lian said. "Could you mail it to my address instead?"
"Sure, no problem," she replied.
Lian avoided the risk of physically entering the building by having the fax sent to the receptionist instead.
Before making that decision, he had already spent time talking to her during his first visit to get a sense of how cooperative she is going to be.
Doing small favors like receiving a fax and forwarding it was simply part of a receptionist's daily work, a fact that Lian was able to take advantage of.
And everybody's first priority at work is to get the job done. Under that
pressure, security practices often take second place and are overlooked or
ignored. Lian relied on this when picking his targets.
--
The next day, a package arrived at the hotel room Lian had rented under a fake name.
Inside was the employee directory.
It not only contained the names, employee IDs, and phone numbers of every employee, but also showed who reported to whom, laying out the clan's entire organizational structure.
Objective Two : Getting the server access.
Target One. Account Setup.
Using the employee directory, Lian picked a recently hired IT administrator named Janney. New employees were usually the easiest to approach. They were still unfamiliar with the company's routines and often eager to make a good impression.
"Hello, am I speaking with Janney?" Lian asked.
"Yeah, that's me."
"I was in a meeting with Lilly Smith about some development work, and she told me to reach out to you to get my account set up. I need it as soon as possible since I've already got a lot of work pending. I'd really appreciate it if you could prioritize it."
"Alright, I can set up your account right away. What's your name and employee code?"
"It's Alan Stone. Employee code 670069. I'll also need administrator access to the mail servers, storage servers, and the log servers."
Janney told Lian that his account had been created and that the login credentials had been sent to his email.
Lian hesitated for a moment. "Actually, I'm having an issue with my mailbox. It's not receiving any emails right now, and I'm in a bit of a rush. Could you read the temporary password over the phone so I can log in and sort it out later?"
After a brief pause, Janney read out the temporary password, and Lian noted it down before thanking her and ending the call.
The trick of intimidation by referencing authority works especially well when the other person is at a fairly low level in the company, just as Lian used the name of her manager and claimed that she had asked him to contact her. It not only overcomes their reluctance and suspicion, but also makes them more eager to help.
Target Two. Email Server
Lian waited until night, knowing no one from the technical team would be on shift.
Using the credentials, he opened the logs server and ran a command that crashed the logging service. He verified that no new logs were being recorded. With the audit trail gone, his actions on the network would leave little evidence behind.
He then accessed the mail server and exported the mailboxes of the clan's senior members. Their inboxes, sent messages, and entire email history were now available to him.
As Lian sifted through the emails, a disturbing pattern began to emerge.
One mail showed a politician thanking the clan for "handling the election disturbance" before asking whether "the reporter issue" had been permanently resolved ahead of Friday's debate.
A mining company sent payment for "site stabilization," requesting that the area be cleared for construction. Which in reality meant forcing every villager out.
An email from a politician asked whether the "shipment" for the opposition candidate had been completed, adding that the outcome should match the accident report already being prepared.
Another email from the same politician ended with an odd request, asking the clan to "arrange a young pizza" for his visit.
In another thread, a judge asked whether a key witness could be "convinced to reconsider" before the next hearing.
Buried among the internal emails, Lian found an ongoing power struggle inside the clan. The two strongest successors were quietly working against each other while trying to win over the weaker third faction before the succession was decided.
--
After going through the emails for nearly three hours, Lian got the basic picture. On the surface, the clans operated as private military contractors, deploying mercenary units to help the military alongside ordinary business dealings.
But behind that respectable image, they handled the kind of work governments and powerful people couldn't be seen doing themselves.
Politicians and other powerful people couldn't openly use the military to get rid of rivals, silence journalists, or intimidate witnesses, so they quietly funded the clans through "donations" and fake business contracts, discussing everything in emails with deliberately vague language that wasn't vague enough.
Good thing I didn't have to pull some James Bond stealth stunt into an isolated section of the headquarters just to retrieve this classified stuff.
Lian thought back to the emails between the three factions.
The two strongest successors were too busy plotting against each other to pay much attention to the third. After all, he was only a talentless Sequence 2 with no real prospects of becoming clan head.
He is weak and desperate.
Exactly the kind of person who would do whatever it takes.
Lian got up from his chair.
Time to pay the weakest successor a visit.
Author's note:
Shit, I think I might have gotten a bit too much in detail and now this looks like a social engineering tutorial, guys this shit is for educational purposes as it is genuinely usable outside the story. And this is how real hackers operate.