Hollywood and hacking don't get along.
Hacking in real life is hard, tedious and time consuming work. It's a 10 second payoff after weeks of testing and experimentation. Movie piracy, meanwhile, is more or less nonsense, while pounding away at a keyboard like your fingers are going out of style.
I'm not a hacker myself, but my college roommate was, and I got interested in hacking Top 6 Websites To Learn To Hack Like A Pro Top 6 Websites To Learn To Hack Like A Pro I want to learn shorten? These informative websites will get you up to speed and help you improve your hacking skills. Read more through osmosis. I have participated in CSAW and other computer security competitions. I've taken classes that included buffer overflow exploitation as homework. I don't claim to be an expert, but I know enough to see it. NCIS it makes the blood come out of my eyes.
Unfortunately, most Hollywood portrayals of computers and hacking are terribly bad. That's a shame, because the few counter examples show that hacking done right can be really cool. On the other hand, sometimes the hacking is so ridiculous that he crosses the line into comedy. For your enjoyment, we have compiled the most notable examples of both. Whether it's good, bad, or so bad it's good, we've got it all below.
The social network , created by Fight Club Director David Fincher tells the story of the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook. It's a great movie, and one that does an excellent job of dealing with computers in an elegant and realistic way.
The social network It's a rare movie to watch if you know the programmers. The technical side of the film is impeccable. Literally everything Zuckerberg says in the above scene makes sense, and it's the most realistic portrayal of modern hacking I've ever seen. That said, the dialogue has clearly been filtered through a writer who has never met a programmer, which makes the jargon look slightly out of place.
Mark Zuckerberg personally opposed freshness of the character of him, saying:
Regardless, The social network it's a great movie, and a great example of how to make hacking interesting, without resorting to crazy animations or screaming typing.
War Games , the 1980s movie where young Matthew Broderick plays computer games with a military AI, isn't where he'd expect to find much technical precision. However, you would be wrong. While dating, War Games is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of early 1980s piracy (“freaking”).
At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist (David) wants to hack the school to change his grades. He does so by glancing at the sticky note where the teachers keep the mainframe password. Later, he uses a real exploit on payphones of the time to make a free call..
Someone did a ridiculous amount of homework for this movie, and it shows. Aside from the military AI, basically everything shown in the movie is real. Ignoring how old fashioned it is, War Games could be the most accurate cinematic depiction of piracy of all time.
Black hat , a recent film starring Chris Hemsworth (AKA Thor), follows a joint Sino-American task force investigating a series of cyberterrorism incidents. The protagonist is a former hacker who was saved from a 15-year sentence to consult on the effort.
The filmmakers clearly did their research, and the result is a remarkably accurate depiction of modern hacking and cyberterrorism. The virus used in the initial attack on a nuclear plant bears a striking resemblance to Stuxnet, a real virus that was used to attack Iranian centrifuges. Can a cyber attack cause physical damage to your hardware? Can a cyber attack cause physical damage to your hardware? Hackers and malware shut down nuclear centrifuges in Iran and severely damaged a German steel factory. Could the software cause physical damage to your computer? Probably not, but anything related is a different story. Read more.
Even though there are some goofy moments, the movie for the most part does a good job of portraying the use of the computer. Blackhat shows us the power of hackers; But is it accurate? Blackhat shows us the power of hackers; But is it accurate? Blackhat is the latest in a line of "hacking action" movies and presents a terrifying picture of what evil computer geniuses can do. But how accurate is it? Should we be worried? Read More Whenever the camera displays a screen, the content is quite believable. Characters use Bash, Emacs, and Linux, and while there are some glimpses of the following code running through a CPU, they're pretty dim compared to some of the movies on this list.
Black hat It deviates a bit from reality in terms of its plot, which is Rube Goldbergian in nature and tends to drift into Hollywood clichés. Hemsworth's character also has far more shootings than real IT security consultants, and ends up shirtless more than you'd expect.
All that said, the movie does an excellent job technically, and most of the attacks in the movie are quite plausible, with social engineering, air-breaching attacks on USB drives, and a keylogger bundled in a PDF. being displayed.
Office Space , Mike Judge's classic comedy about suburban middle-class hell, is a fantastic movie, but most people wouldn't think of it as a movie about piracy. The fact that Office Space making the “Best” list is a good indication of how few movies represent piracy well. Office Space uses hacking only as a relatively minor plot device. I still think Office space deserves a place on the list, not so much for what it does as for what it doesn't.
There is a sequence in the movie where the characters plant a virus on a company computer. The scene is tense, and it accurately conveys what's happening, and it does so without using technobabble or CG. The movie doesn't go into enough detail for anything to go wrong. If your movie isn't primarily about technology, that's exactly the right way to do it.
Hackers It is notable for being perhaps the most inaccurate depiction of hacking of all time. The technobabble is incomprehensible, and every time a character hits a keyboard, an 80s CG acid trip ensues. This movie is ridiculous.
That said, despite its many flaws, the film does a very good job of capturing some elements of hacker culture. Maybe it was prophetic, or maybe it was so iconic that it shaped hacker culture 10 of the world's most famous hackers (and what happened to them) 10 of the world's most famous hackers (and what happened to them) white hat hackers versus black -What hackers. Here are the most famous hackers in history and what they are doing today. Read More Either way, you can't help but feel like the characters are real hackers. Or, at least, they are the real hackers who aspire to be the top 4 hacker groups and what they want. 4 the best hacker groups and what they want. It's easy to think of hacking groups as some kind of romantic revolutionaries at heart. But who are they really? What do they represent and what attacks have they carried out in the past? Read more.
When franchises go on too long, it's often the third movie where everything falls apart. Alien 3 , Shrek 3 , Terminator 3 . The Die Hard The franchise managed to hang on a bit longer, putting out three decent movies. Then everything got a little weird. It's not even that Live free or die hard It's a bad movie, it's just that the world wasn't ready for a Die Hard which included Justin Long as the main character.
The villains in Live Free or Die Hard they're hackers - which, in this film, is pretty much the same thing as "wizard." Hackers can hack into traffic lights, the stock market, cell phones, bank accounts, military planes, and, in one memorable scene, the abstract concept of fire.
Hacking, in the Die Hard universe, it's basically necromancy for electronic devices. Can hackers REALLY take over your car? Can hackers REALLY take over your car? Read more . It's absurd, but I think this is an example that crosses the line towards true pleasure..
(The video is NSFW)
Making a list of the best movie piracy is challenging due to the number of good examples out there. Making a list of bad tricks is difficult for the opposite reason. There are so many examples that it's hard to decide what the list should do.
Hacking and technobabble in. Swordfish It's bad, but it's not noticeable. The reason the movie makes the list is almost exclusively for the scene above, where a hacker is forced to hack into the pentagon with a gun to his head, and monkey business goes on under the desk. The sheer absurdity of this scene will live forever in the annals of bad movie history.
Hacking in Skyfall It's notable for the amount of work the creators go to to get it wrong. Fall from the sky Piracy is beautifully crafted, crafted, garbage..
Piracy plays a big role in Fall from the sky , because it relates to the theme of the old world being replaced by the new world. The film departs from an older Bond and the human intelligence he represents against cyberterrorism and the younger, more tech-savvy agents.
The villain, Raoul Silva, is a hacker attacking Britain out of revenge against his former boss. At various points, Silva uses hacking to blow up buildings, escape from prison, and make viral videos. The visualizations used to portray these things are beautiful and also complete nonsense.
Consider the scene above:what is actually happening there (an evidence retrieved for analysis turned out to have a malicious payload) is reasonable. But the way it is portrayed is absurd. The code analysis tool displayed on the screen looks neat, but useless; and that's before it inexplicably transforms into a meter diagram. Technobabble includes real words, but the sentences mostly mean nothing. They clearly had competent technical advisers on staff, but chose to ignore them completely.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel. As computers become more ubiquitous, audiences are getting smarter and representations of computer use are improving. As the insightful video above demonstrates, much of the early portraits of Hollywood tech were painfully awkward. Since then, little by little we have been developing conventions to deal with them..
The portrayal of Hollywood hacking is also improving, slowly.
House of cards The representation of computer security is not great, but it is better than it would have been 10 years ago. Concepts like encryption and proxy servers and digital signatures are starting to penetrate the popular consciousness. Not just out of popular interest, but out of necessity:as more and more of our lives are lived online, people need to be increasingly aware of the dangers posed by hackers and malware.
As television executives realize that computer security is becoming a part of everyday life, we should continue to see better and more accurate representations of what it entails. It's important for movies to get this right, because it's becoming more and more relevant to the lives of their audiences.
What do you think? Do you really care about hacking accuracy in movies? Or is it really not that important in the grand scheme of things? Did we miss a great example of good or bad hacking? Please let us know in the comments section below!
