Keep the beams standing. Replace what they carry.
— The 36 Stratagems, Replace the beams with rotten timbers
Previously on this series:
#23: Alex Counted the AI's Hands. Lena Set the Bait. — The honeypot in the MediSys sandbox was hit twice. The first hit came through the Singapore node. The second came from an unknown source. On the other side, Lena fed forged node-signature data into ACL's monitoring pipeline. Leo ran one interval comparison over the old channel. The conclusion landed in the hands of someone he didn't know.
#24: Leo Built a Corridor. The AI Thought It Was a Road. — Derek sent raw logs, uncleaned, and let Leo pull his own features. Leo built a three-layer corridor: a legacy API up top, a database query interface in the middle, an admin endpoint at the deepest layer. The scan source walked in, layer by layer. The profile was archived. The auto-flag was live. Next time I see it, I'll recognize it.
