Hold on to your butts.
I say this every time I perform an Atomic operation.
Hacking in the Movies is Open for Submissions →
Contribute some words/videos/pictures of your favorite movie/television hack.
I’ve only seen bits and pieces of The Italian Job (2003), but from what I can remember, the movie-hacker is called “Napster” because he claims he was the original creator of Napster . Not only is this a dumb movie-lie, but it also will forever date this film to the early 2000’s. Do the kids these days even know what Napster was?
Things that are unlikely:
- It is unlikely every (or any) traffic camera in the city will be accessible. See common hacker trope: Everything is Online.
- It is unlikely that, given that a traffic camera is accessible, there will be an Enhance Button
- It is unlikely that the Enhance Button will be able to do anything quickly on a dinky little Dell laptop.
- It is unlikely that, if you are causing a potential series of vehicular manslaughter charges, you will be doing it in a public mass transit terminal. The guy with the big computer cart, salivating near the baggage claim? Yeah that’s not suspicious at all in a post-9/11 world.
My favorite part of this clip? The ominous:
It’s not a crash…
At 3:27
“You’ll never shut down the real Napster.” Unless, of course, you are Metallica.
Update, Feb 9, 2010: It looks like there was a takedown notice on this clip by Paramount, but you can put The Italian Job on your Netflix queue…or not. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Masterminds, 1997
I’ve never seen the movie Masterminds, but I’ll nevertheless discuss what’s going on in this movie-hack.
That Initialize phone route system command? That is really just the hacker/protaganist connecting to some sort of Proxy server. Certain proxy servers attempt to anonymize the user, which might be a good idea if you will be stealing proprietary software.
Initialize phone route system, though a very human-friendly command, probably won’t get you to far. Check the ssh man page to learn about connecting to a remote host.
It’s easy to set up a shell configuration file so that on startup or login, the computer echoes out “Fear is Our Business.”
I would suggest that knowing an intruder is in your system (through some sort of Intrusion detection system ) and still granting that Hacker access to the system through a game is an anti-pattern.
I also find it hard to believe that a gaming company would create, as it’s primary defense against attacks, a game. Computer game software is notoriously difficult to produce, and to find enough time to develop an entirely separate game to protect the main product, seems entirely out-of-scope. Who authorized this? They should be fired.
Hackers, 1995
No, your sprinkler system is not accessible via the internet.
In The Terminator, the camera assumes the Point of View of the T-800.
And what does the Robot see? Why it’s 6502 Assembly, of course!
Assembly language is a low-level programming language for programming microprocessors. Where a language like C is portable, an assembly language is specific to a certain hardware.
So maybe the guts of a T-800 is similar to a NES?
You can learn 6502 Assembly, but that stuff is all greek to me. Learn something at a higher level.
Zoom in on that. Now enhance it.
