Stories of samlock’s methods are the stuff of fireside tech-lore. Some insist samlock favored human vectors — a low-level admin with a taste for midnight chess, a janitor with access badges — people who slid open doors without ceremony. Others whispered of small, elegant scripts that read patterns where humans saw chaos: time-stamped keystrokes, thermal flickers on surveillance footage, the way a password manager autofilled with the rhythm of its owner’s panic. The actual techniques mattered less than the signature: a tiny glyph left in the margins, a stylized “n.s.” embedded in metadata as if the interlocutor had signed a letter.