She looked at the little tower under Oakes’s desk. Somewhere out there, the attacker was probably watching a dashboard of their own. Watching the green lights turn amber. Watching the defenses crumble from the inside.
The server was a small desktop tower under Oakes’s desk, labeled “LOCAL LOG CACHE — DO NOT REMOVE.” She knelt and attached her forensic bridge. endpoint security uninstall tool
“Isolate the machine,” she said. “Full network cut. I’m driving in.” She looked at the little tower under Oakes’s desk
“Including a tiny piece of code that lives in a Windows update process and waits to uninstall our endpoint agent on command.” endpoint security uninstall tool
She pulled up Daniel Oakes’s network logs from before isolation. The last clean hour of his machine’s life. DNS requests. HTTP calls. Nothing unusual until—