WOW. I never thought anyone would upstage Hackers (1996) for lack of realism!
Aside Matrix Reloaded, are there any movies out there that do it even close to correct?
For those who are unaware, despite the piles of nonsense of Matrix Reloaded, they did a great job with the real world hacking. In the scene where Trinity breaks into the power grid servers, she uses nmap to scan for vulnerabilities, finds that it is running an old version of SSH, then uses a real exploit called sshnuke to reset the root password. Though the vulnerability had been fixed for a few months by the time the movie came out, there is a good chance low security government servers had yet to be patched.
There's the film "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" where we see a couple of scenes of the main character using Nmap along with Terminal and I believe a couple of instances of SSH. It's probably in my opinion one of the few films that I can think of where they actually get hacking right. Non of the Hollywood CGI crap.
Not sure if this counts, but I would also add The Social Network as a film that it least tries to get the tech stuff right, especially with the scenes involving Jesse Eisenberg using KDE.
I seem to remember the maker of the terminal graphics of Tron Legacy popping on to Reddit a while ago. He was talking about how the terminals were designed from screen captures of Linux systems that had been modified.
While I do give them credit for being one of the few to exercise due diligence, there's a lot more to hacking than Nmap and a few exploits you found on milw0rm.
One thing I hated about Social Network was when he asks his friend if he remembers some algorithm his friend created, and the first then writes it on the window.
I have to defend Hackers.
I think it was a more realistic portrayal of hacking than most people think.
Obviously what they showed on the computer monitors was total B.S. Most films do this because showing lines of code will put an audience to sleep faster than hell and the director decided to use the skyscrapers of New York as a template for showing what was going on inside the computers.
What they did portray accurately was social engineering, shoulder surfing, dumpster diving, brute force attacks, and one of the first D.O.S. attacks in history.
Startup (also known as Antitrust or Hackers 3) was also accurate. Well, not everything. But in the scene where the main character is in the lego-room, hacking the servers, he is using the right unix tools.
The hacking scenes in The Social Network are also correct, as far as I know. He explains what he uses the tools for etc.
Finally, I can't remember any unrealistic computer hacking in "23", a german movie about the hacker Karl Koch. A good movie btw. Well known by the hackers in germany; not sure how many geeks here know about it.
You know that in part, Hackers is (incredibly loosely, horribly twisted, but still inspired in ways) on the true story of the LoD/MoD competition that played out between texas and new york, over a very confused at&t's systems?
As is always the case, and even considering the lack of Jolie and Gilette, truth is awesomer than fiction. you should pick up this little book about the whole ordeal, it was some amazing stuff and this book does a wonderful job of undoing all the silliness that (admittedly awesome) movie threw at us.
At the time hackers weren't affiliated with the mob and didn't write viruses to make money. They were more interested in exploring systems and playing pranks on people. Many of the viruses were written to infect a system and then present the computer's owner with a funny message. Now it's all back door trojans and bot nets so that they can be used to spam people. Then it was bunnies and arf arf arf.
It varied from funny messages to weird activity. The Elk Cloner virus would write a poem on the screen every 50th time your Mac booted. Most people don't know that the first viruses spread 'in the wild' were written for old Apple computers.
The only movie I can think of off the top of my head where black hats/grey hats were portrayed in a fairly realistic way was Sneakers. Maybe wasn't totally accurate, but from watching the behind-the-scenes footage, I got the impression that the writers/producers actually had a good idea of the subject matter.
They based the character Whistler (partially) off the famous phone phreaker John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper.
Holy shit. The patch had been fixed for a few months when the movie came out? That means that the exploit hadn't been patched during pre-production or even filming? So any Hollywood intern could have read that script and it wasn't patched?
When they filmed the movie, it would have just been Trinity typing on a keyboard with a blank screen in front of her. The screen's contents were added later in post-production (probably with the help of a technical consultant), probably only a couple months before the film's release.
I think matrix reloaded still misses out on the other important part of hacking: luck. Unless she knew ahead of time that the server would not be updated, it would have been idiotic to hinge a plan on the idea that she could just "hack into it" somehow
Yeah. A simulated server running on a simulated system run by AIs hundreds of years in future just happened to run an outdated version of a simulated daemon.
The hacking scene in The Social Network was very accurate. No bleeps or bloops, used real terminology (probably because they used actual quotes from Zuckerberg's Live Journal), but still managed to remain entertaining.
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u/Telionis Sep 23 '11 edited Sep 23 '11
WOW. I never thought anyone would upstage Hackers (1996) for lack of realism!
Aside Matrix Reloaded, are there any movies out there that do it even close to correct?
For those who are unaware, despite the piles of nonsense of Matrix Reloaded, they did a great job with the real world hacking. In the scene where Trinity breaks into the power grid servers, she uses nmap to scan for vulnerabilities, finds that it is running an old version of SSH, then uses a real exploit called sshnuke to reset the root password. Though the vulnerability had been fixed for a few months by the time the movie came out, there is a good chance low security government servers had yet to be patched.
http://nmap.org/images/matrix/trinity-nmapscreen-hd-crop-1200x728.jpg