Chapter 94: Mysterious Invitation Letter (Part 1) (Patreon)

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After finishing, Sun Cheng was about to leave when he received a message he didn't expect. The other party had accepted his friend request.

"You're still up..."

Sun Cheng was slightly surprised to see that the other party's gender was female. He didn't expect that someone would still be awake at this hour.

"Ding ding..."

With a familiar message notification sound, a chat box quickly appeared on oo. He clicked on it and saw that it was '22', who took the initiative to chat with him.

"Hello, are you the creator of Pure XP from Cybertron Studio?"

"Yes, I am. Nice to meet you, 22 editor."

"Oh, hello. Pure XP is really an outstanding work. Yesterday, Blue Star recommended it to me, and I didn't believe it at first. But when I tried it, I realized that it is really an excellent work. A simplified and pure product that doesn't affect the stability of the system at all. Not just in China, but even on some well-known Microsoft system forums abroad, it is difficult to find a second product like this. So, I want to ask, are you interested in signing a contract with our website?"

Sun Cheng was curious about this. He asked, "XP's copyright belongs to Microsoft. Products like this are generally unauthorized. How can you promote it commercially?"

The other party's reply was quick and direct. "We can't do it openly, but we can find ways to do it indirectly. Have you ever bought a system disk? The general Microsoft's official system disk used to cost thousands, and even if the price has dropped in recent years, a cheap in8 official disk costs one or two hundred. Although China supports genuine products, how many families are willing to buy the expensive Microsoft official disk instead of using a cheap pirated disk?"

Sun Cheng understood. This was piracy. It was not difficult to pirate disks with an investment of a few hundred thousand. However, it was difficult for Microsoft to investigate. Even if they traced it back to XP's website, they could argue that the shared products on the website were used by private pirates. After all, websites like XP, which promoted XP systems, did not restrict downloads.

After further discussion, Sun Cheng learned that even if XP sold a disk with authorization, he would only receive three cents. He immediately lost interest in signing a contract with XP.

However, in order to advertise for Cybertron Studio, he eventually agreed to authorize XP to use his work, on the condition that they must indicate that the work was created by Cybertron Studio and must not remove the logo and other information embedded in the installation package, whether in website promotion or disk sales.

Before preparing to shut down his computer, Sun Cheng casually opened his email to see if he had received a reply from zerodium, the vulnerability acquisition platform. To his surprise, he saw a bunch of unread emails, including one in English, which was received three hours ago in the real world.

At that time, if Sun Cheng remembered correctly, he was trapped in an alley by Xiao Hong and a few others and almost couldn't make it back.

Although the millions of dollars worth of jewelry used for experiments had been brought back, they still required some falsification in reality, which was quite troublesome.

Therefore, Sun Cheng valued the huge reward from Zerodium very much.

He clicked on the email from the foreigner who had come over.

"Dear Mr. Sun Cheng, please allow me to express my respect to you and your team - Cybertron Studio. Our testers have verified the data you sent and confirmed the existence of an iOS vulnerability. Zerodium will pay your team a reward of $54,000 for the attack, as agreed, and we hope you can complete the follow-up data as soon as possible. In your email, you mentioned that you found two extremely hidden and high-risk vulnerabilities in iOS, which has excited Zerodium. We hope to receive your reply soon. Please don't worry about the reward, Zerodium is a very reputable platform!"

Zerodium claimed to be very reputable, which almost made Sun Cheng laugh out loud.

In the Western world, especially in the United States, this vulnerability acquisition platform that has been fighting against Microsoft, Google, and Apple since its inception is notorious.

Sun Cheng had heard a lot of rumors about Microsoft's operating system, Google's search vulnerabilities, and iOS system vulnerabilities being acquired by Zerodium and turned into profit-making tools sold to European and American governments, intelligence agencies, and some internet companies, but it was not easy for it to survive until now.

However, although Zerodium's reputation was bad, Sun Cheng had never heard of any rumors of selling vulnerabilities to Zerodium being embezzled.

Although his bank card had opened up foreign exchange functions, he did not know why there was no SMS reminder.

In order to confirm whether the other party had transferred the money, Sun Cheng had to log onto the app of China Rural Credit Cooperatives Bank and check it out. Sure enough, there was an additional $54,000 in his bank account.

Compared to the number of vulnerabilities he had sent out, the reward of $54,000 was not high, but with the stingy Apple company in front of him, he suddenly felt that it was acceptable.

After confirming that Zerodium had paid him the reward he deserved, Sun Cheng took out the USB flash drive where he stored the vulnerabilities from the drawer, and read it with the laptop that had transformed from Safeguard. He then sent another email, not only completing all the follow-up information of the vulnerabilities that he had not sent last time but also releasing a part of the two high-risk vulnerabilities that the other party was most eager to obtain.

He would only send the rest when Zerodium had transferred the reward and he was satisfied with the amount.

Sun Cheng was delayed by these two things. By the time he was ready to go to bed, it was already past one o'clock in the morning, and he was very sleepy.

Before going to bed, he gave orders to the defender to invade the police station in Nandu City, quickly find information such as Xiao Hong's data and address, and then he climbed into bed and soon fell asleep.

[Read at www.patreon.com/shanefreak, without ads and support the work.]

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Next Chapter >>Chapter 95: Mysterious Invitation Letter (Part 2)