The attacker had locked the service control manager.
Somewhere, in the labyrinth of the city below, a rival contractor was inside her system. They couldn't steal her files (her encryption was too good), but they could see her tools. They had identified the heart of her operation: the Connectify Filter Driver. It was the gatekeeper that allowed her to re-route traffic with surgical precision. connectify filter driver is disabled
She had ten minutes left on her backup battery. She couldn't reboot—the attacker would just kill the driver again during startup. She needed a deeper magic. The attacker had locked the service control manager