His webcam light turned on.

Someone had planted it. And Marcus had just run it – not in a VM, but on his real machine first, before moving it to the VM. He had forgotten to check the actual file creation date.

Curiosity got the better of him. He isolated an old Windows XP virtual machine and ran spbup.exe .

Marcus found the file on an old USB drive labeled “2007 – Archive.” The drive had been sitting in a drawer for over a decade, a relic from his early IT days. The only file that wasn’t a JPEG or a DOC was spbup.exe .