"They've taken over the SDK's memory space," Jenna whispered, understanding dawning on her face. "They're not hacking the camera. They're hacking the library that talks to the camera. They've inserted a shim between the hardware and our software. DHNetSDK is feeding us a perfect lie."
For ten seconds, nothing happened. Then, the screen flickered.
But the visual feed on the main screen told a different story. Channel 44, a camera aimed at the intersection of 5th and Main, showed a perfect, high-definition image of an empty street. The timestamp was correct. The weather overlay matched the real-time sensors. It looked perfect.
"Jenna, come look at this," he called across the dimly lit command center.
She tapped her keyboard. A secondary window popped up, showing a jagged wave of blue lines. "Uh… Leo. The magnetometers are going crazy. It's showing a density of about 200 people moving through that intersection every minute."
The server's CPU spiked to 100%. The fans roared. The log window filled with red errors: [ERROR] [DHNetSDK] Buffer overflow at channel 44. Memory corruption detected. Then channel 45. Channel 46.
"Run the pedestrian flow from the street-level magnetometers," Leo said.