Elias scoffed. "They always say that about cracks," he muttered, manually disabling his firewall. He extracted the file and ran the executable.

However, the professional version had features Elias craved—advanced temperature tracking and scheduled tests—that were locked behind a paywall. He didn't want to pay. He wanted those features now .

Then, the screen flickered. A command prompt window opened and closed in a millisecond. Elias tried to move his mouse, but the cursor moved on its own, sliding toward his browser. It opened his saved passwords. It navigated to his banking portal.