Hacker at the Fingertips

The story centers on Yang Tian, a twenty-year-old student at FD University in Shanghai. He hardly ever attends class, earning his living through formidable programming and networking skills: he writes worm viruses and releases them online, then anonymously sells the source code and removal solutions to security software companies for a fee. His self-built firewall, the Great Wall, layers defense upon defense and lets him slip past every attempt to trace him. In hacker circles, the handle "Wei Chao" belongs to a figure who vanished over a year ago and is revered as little short of legend.

To find his missing brothers Feng Juan and Yun Xi, Yang Tian and his companions found the hacker group Evil Decimal, crossing swords with forces at home and abroad in the online world. The book depicts the "hacker world's war of faith," the "Guinness of the Internet," the "Sino-Japanese hacker war," and the power struggles among groups such as Gu Hei Lun, Yi Xian Tian, and Xiao Yao Yu, culminating in the "Final War." Through the distinction between red hats, white hats, and gray hats, it also explores the tension between technology, freedom, and the line that should not be crossed.

One caveat: as an early work of online serial fiction, the book carries many technical details and insider conventions that bear the clear stamp of its era. It is best read as a legendary urban internet novel, and the intrusion techniques it describes are not instructional material for real life.