Hacker

Hacker is a novel by Zhao Dan, published by Writers Publishing House in 2011, and one of the earlier full-length Chinese works to treat the hacker world as its central subject. The author is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry who has long dealt with real attack-and-defense scenarios, so the book's depictions of intrusion techniques, Trojan persistence, data theft, and anti-tracking are all grounded in real cases and presented in fictional form. The story revolves around a covert war between a Chinese pharmaceutical company and a foreign counterpart. Behind what looks like ordinary business competition, each side deploys hackers in a repeated tug-of-war in cyberspace—stealing secrets and counter-stealing, planting and purging, breaching and repairing. Every pleasantry at the negotiating table may correspond to a battle deep in the servers; the leak or safeguarding of a single piece of key data can rewrite the outcome of a partnership. The characters include both technically formidable, ruthless attackers and defenders who hold the line amid the gray, and their choices and maneuvers form the novel's main tension. Because his work involves confidentiality, the author did not write nonfiction; instead he weaves technical details he witnessed and heard about into fictional characters and events. As readers follow the plot, they gradually realize that things dismissed as urban legends—"the computer turned itself on," "the file vanished"—are no exaggeration in the technical world.