The data stream on his screen suddenly inverted. It was no longer showing incoming traffic from the malware. It was showing outgoing traffic from his own computer.

Desperation, mixed with the delirium of exhaustion, started to cloud his judgment.

Ice water seemed to flood Leo's veins. He realized the fatal irony in a split second. In his desperation to use a network sniffer to catch a thief, he had invited a thief directly into his system. The keygen wasn't just generating keys; it was a Trojan.

He looked at the bottom corner of the HTTP Debugger window. A new, unauthorized connection had appeared. It wasn't the malware he was tracking. The source of the connection was Keygen.exe .

The search results populated instantly. They were a minefield of sketchy domains, blinking download buttons, and glowing green promises of "100% Working Keygens."