She was staring at her computer screen trying to figure out her next step.
Which is what she had been doing for a few hours.
She still didn't know.
Normally when she found a way into a system she poked around for awhile to see how far she could go. What damage she could have done if doing damage was her aim. She wanted to see how bad it was before she contacted either her supervisor, if it was a work assignment, or the company directly if it was on her own time.
Almost every major company had an IT department that was responsible for such things. And most of them also had a bounty system in place to encourage hackers like herself to tell them about the problem instead of exploiting it, or worse, selling it to a competitor or a chaos monger.
But this? Who did she even contact with this information? How did you let Santa know something like this? Write a letter and mail it to the North Pole? Hoping it got there and not to some Podunk mail stop somewhere where people volunteered to answer "Santa Letters." What if the person who opened it either didn't take it seriously or worse took the information to the press? She clearly wouldn't put in the letter how she did it, you never give up the goods in first contact, but as soon as the information that there was an exploit was out there? Well...
So that wasn't going to work.
She scrolled around while she thought.
The whole database was searchable. As soon as she started to realize what she was looking at she did a quick spot check search. She started with her best friend's newborn. If anyone was going to be on the Nice list it would be a baby right? No chance to screw anything up just yet. She had also looked up more than one politician. The shocker there was the number of them that were on the Nice list. She had thought it would be a clean sweep to the Naughty, but the percentages didn't always fall that way.
That was another surprise for her. The percentages. It wasn't a simple yes/no coding program. It was percentage Nice vs. percentage Naughty. And those percentages were constantly moving. She could just imagine someone, say Alice Abernanthy, going through their day. A solid 90% Nice. Until around noon, and then BOOM! 75%. What happened there, Alice? Got a little hangry? But then as soon as it dipped, it went right back to climbing again.
It was all tied to multiple other branching programs. There were time cut offs for reports to be sent to various other systems. She imagined those must be the Elves' workstations? There was a Guarantee Nice, a Guarantee Naughty and an On The Bubble list being created constantly. The Guarantee Nice list was tied to a gift program. She had access to that as well. Good Ole Alice even with her dip into the 70s around lunch, was on the Guarantee Nice and would be receiving "one prime parking space near the door during a rain storm." Being from the PNW she could appreciate what a great gift that actually was.
The Guarantee Naughty list was tied to the "C.O.A.L. Department." It seemed to run the same way as the gift list just with a shift in what you would be receiving. There was an Andrew Adamton who would be getting gum stuck on his brand new loafers that he would spread to the carpet in his car, the tile in his boss' office and somehow the top of his other shoe.
She spent awhile trying to decide what C.O.A.L. was an acronym for, Cancel Our Annual Love? Contains One Absolute Lament? Could One Appeal Losing? Who knew? Well, clearly they did, maybe she'd ask as part of her bounty for turning this in to the proper authorities.
She had thought, for a moment, of printing it all Wikileaks style. After all didn't people have a right to know where they stood? It would be easy enough to do a freeze of the information as of today and let people get a glimpse of their true placement.
But she hadn't considered that for very long. After all she had access to the whole list and hadn't looked herself up. She just wasn't sure what that would do to a person. If you thought you were doing everything right and found out you were 70% Naughty? How would you handle that? Would it make you want to be better or would you say screw it and just go flat out Naughty? She remembered the 2016 elections when Clinton had made her big Baskets mistake. Nobody ever remembered her metaphor included two baskets and people chose to jump into the deplorable one. Would that be the same result? Would people just choose to jump on to the Naughty list with both feet? And what happens when you start searching your friends? Your neighbors? Your family?
Too messy for her for sure.
Well that and when she wasn't sure what she was really looking at and just scrolling the lines of code in the beginning she might have seen Julian Assange's list placement. Wikileaks style wasn't the best option.
So she was back to trying to figure out how she got the news to the right place that the system was hackable. Everything she could think of she had seen in a movie or read in a story. Was any of it real? She knew, clearly, that at least some of it was real as she was currently watching the Naughty/ Nice percentages of strangers change on her computer screen.
"The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear."
Might as well try.
"I'm in my office, and I'm singing! I hacked the Naughty/Nice list and I want to report it to you! I'm singing, and I'm reporting! And I believe in you! I believe in you! I believe in you!"
For a minute nothing happened. Then her screen went black. Then the snow started.
Not snow like static on a screen, but snow, honest to goodness snow started to fall in the computer screen image, then on her desk, then in her office. She heard sleigh bells and the image on her screen changed again.
100% Nice! Ho! Ho! Ho!
She started to laugh.
Fingers crossed she was getting a good parking space!
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