Hollywood Treats Hackers Pretty Well

angry tapir writes "According to Damian Gordon, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, hackers are treated pretty well by movie-makers. Gordon studied 50 movies, produced over five decades, to help write an academic paper for the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."

Comments

Yes, but

[colmore]

Too bad scenes of someone typing furiously at a computer are boring as hell.

Re:Yes, but

[uberjack]

As are command prompts, apparently. I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's open source. Write it yourself.

Re:Yes, but

[rsborg]

Too bad scenes of someone typing furiously at a computer are boring as hell.

You know, I think movies like Wargames, Matrix (and to a smaller extent, Sneakers) did this pretty decently. For example, the scene where Neo is first contacted by Trinity is a great example of how powerful text can be, if used properly.

Re:Yes, but

[mcgrew]

To be fair, Trinity not only used the command prompt, but a real, actual security tool. However, the exeption does prove the rule, doesn't it?

The last Die Hard movie was unbelievable in every respect (just like the previous three) but it was a great homage to us nerds. In fact, the only characters in the movie who weren't nerds were McClain and his daughter (and possibly the assassins as well, but those characters weren't developed enough to tell).

It even had the middle-aged fat nerd in his mom's basement in his "command center"!
"How do we find his house?"
"Uh, it'll be the one with the lights on."

It had the extra-nerdy attraction of two of the main characters played by Tim Russ and Robert Beltran (Tuvok and Chakotay). If you have enough suspension of disbelief, it's an incredibly nerdy and entertaining movie. Just get the unrated version, the theatrical release was crap. "She's at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV crammed up her ass". How they thought a Die Hard without "yippiekayay motherfucler" would be a box office hit was beyond me, but they fixed it in the unrated DVD.

Re:Yes, but

[The Archon V2.0]

As are command prompts, apparently. I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.

Hell, no. Have you seen the fonts on those things, they're HUGE! You get less characters per screen than a VIC-20. And you have to sit through 20 seconds of animations of lined globes and screen-filling blinking/pulsing OVERRIDE and SYSTEM MALFUNCTION and PASSWORD DENIED every freakin' time you do something. It's like the UI designer made it for an uninformed audience watching the action second-hand on a television set, not for the person using it!

Re:Yes, but

[Rysc]

In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.

Re:Yes, but

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

check out the "ease-of-use of the Zeus crimeware toolkit":
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/zeus-king-underground-crimeware-toolkits
In the YouTube video at 1:48 you can see the ZuesBuilder gui

Re:Yes, but

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> "The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're
> professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."

With all due respect, Robert Redford raised the average age quite a bit. :-/

Re:Yes, but

[dangitman]

Dear Die Hard,

You rock. Especially the part where that dude is on the rooftop, and you use Emacs to reconfigure his system files to cause a buffer overflow.

P.S. Do you know Mad Max?

Homer J. Simpson

Re:Yes, but

[dangitman]

In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.

Heretic.

Wargames in the top five hacker movies? Nonsense. Wargames is the greatest film ever made. No need to restrict the statement to "hacker movies." Get out of here with your foolish Sneakers superiority complex.

Re:Yes, but

[amasiancrasian]

Trinity used nmap and a tool called `sshnuke,' a tool that presumably exploited the SSH1 CRC32 exploit. If you want to talk about realism, nothing really gets more real than this in the movies. Here's a picture of this Hollywood anomaly.

You call that well treated?

[Rysc]

The person's themselves may be realistic in terms of age and profession, but nothing else is well treated. Movies continue to routinely portray unrealistic and nonsensical computer interactions and capabilities, which is particularly harmful to a depiction of a hacker.

Re:You call that well treated?

[Manip]

While hackers are often shown to have super-technical abilities that make no sense, so are the "good guys." I think to some degree it kind of counter-balances the whole thing.

Computers/technology isn't accurate in films but that is a small part of a much larger science rant in which all of the fields of science are abused for your viewing pleasure, biology, chemistry, engineering, and psychics.

Heck even psychology is abused in movies and that is borderline pseudoscience anyway....

Re:You call that well treated?

[Em Emalb]

I beg to differ, I'm pretty sure Hugh Jackman's character in Swordfish was treated pretty well...during some of the "hacking" scenes, anyway.

Re:You call that well treated?

[ShiningSomething]

It's the same phenomenon at play in journalism. The more you know about a topic, the more you realize they have no idea what they are talking about.

Re:You call that well treated?

[camperdave]

While hackers are often shown to have super-technical abilities that make no sense, so are the "good guys."

I'm confused. You say that hackers are shown to have super-technical abilities, but so are the good guys. That doesn't make any sense.

[Blink]
Wait... Are you trying to say that hackers are the bad guys?

Re:You call that well treated?

[Bakkster]

What, you mean you've never hacked the Gibson!? Just because you're a bad hacker doesn't mean they should dumb down the hackers in movies for you.

Re:You call that well treated?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I think even the "realistic" parts of the portrayal are accidental. I mean a white male of professional age in a setting with lots of computer equipment isn't exactly a stretch. It's probably the opposite: most hackers fit into the most boring stereotype known to man.

Re:You call that well treated?

[Xelios]

CSI is particularly bad for this, "see if you can enhance that license plate"

Re:You call that well treated?

[srussia]

You call that realistic? Realistic would be an obese mouth-breathing zit-encrusted neckbeard with eyeglasses taped together screaming "LOL I troll you!" while typing furiously into a sticky keyboard, piss-bottle at the ready, bound in a semen-crusted dragon shirt and yellow skid-marked briefs. What's surprising is that Hollywood dosen't use the actual stereotype as described above. .

Jurassic Park

Dennis Nedry played by Wayne Knight (aka Newman on Seinfeld)

A cartoon image of Nedry appears on the screen and waves its little finger disapprovingly.

CARTOON NEDRY: "You didn't say the magic word!"

ARNOLD: Please, God damn it! I hate this hacker crap!

Close enough?

Re:You call that well treated?

[sourcerror]

Please tell me, how psycho-analysis traces back phenomenons to neural networks? Or transactional psychology?
Sorry to disappoint you but the science that researches neural networks is not psychology, but machine-learning. Psychologists don't know shit about neural networks.

On the other hand psychiatry dwelves into bio-chemistry and in the anatomy of brain, but it's a completely different profession, they're basically doctors, not some liberal-art majors. They might have more knowledge about neural networks as well.

I can't resist, but link to Feynamann.

Re:You call that well treated?

[electrons_are_brave]

Hello - qualified person speaking here. In defense of my field:

(a) The practice of clinical psychology ranges from evidence-based (e.g. CBT) through to "Lets go into the safe room and I'll wrap you in a blanket and regress you through your past lives". Evidence based practice is based on science, random placebo-controlled trials and so on, so it's as scientific or unscientific as any other medically aligned field.

If you ever need a psych., get a referral from a doctor or a hospital, check that they are registered with the professional body in your country, what their quals are and - at the first session - ask them to describe the treatment plan, how many sessions it usually takes, what the prognosis is for the method they use and so on. STAY AWAY from anyone who talks about "repressed memories", thinks "dream analysis" is a science or who uses the words "deep" "buried" "unconscious" and "mind" in the same sentence. These people are a dying breed, fortunately.

(b) The theoretical basis of psychology is basically that human behavior is determined by your biology interacting with a complex social and physical environment within a framework of the habitiual responses you have learned in the past. So different researchers focus on differnt part of this complex system e.g cognitive neuropsychs look at the architecture of cognition, brain models etc, physiological psychs look at neural networks, hormones, brain structure, social psychs look at the social influences and how these moderate behaviour, evolutionary psychs speak circular crap in the popular press and so on.

BTW, psychology may well be a "liberal arts" major in the USA, but that's not the case in my neck of the woods - at my university its taught in the same department which teaches nursing and other allied health fields, although it vaires from uni to uni.

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did this "study" get funding? Because it would make headlines.

Poor old Professor Knowsmath and his study of non-commutive ring structures in siberian oscillations. He'll have to make do with the money the university raised from raffling off that cat (4 euros).

News Flash!

[WrongSizeGlass]

Hollywood takes creative license ... produces more entertaining product.

Nothing to see here. Move along ...

Re:News Flash!

[Ltap]

No. It provides a more entertaining product... for stupid people. Anyone who has any knowledge of the subject matter or is intelligent enough to note the inconsistencies will be put off by it and dislike the writers for it.

Re:News Flash!

[0racle]

If they had to stick with real depictions of, well in this case hackers, every movie about it would look like Office Space and Dilbert. We've seen those so apparently no other movie about or related to the subject can ever be made.

Most people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.

Re:News Flash!

[WrongSizeGlass]

IMost people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.

I'm waiting for the movie about 'Slashdot Karma Whores'. I'm positive I won't like the way those guys are portrayed. Stupid writers.

Re:News Flash!

[Sir_Lewk]

I don't think this is true at all. Movies like Wargames manage to be decently realistic (at least not offensively unrealistic) and not boring at all. Best part of that movie is when he has to spend time researching his target.

Re:News Flash!

[dangitman]

I don't think this is true at all. Movies like Wargames manage to be decently realistic

Yes, a kid having conversations with an intelligent computer, who then evades authorities and escapes from the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD facility, and nuclear war is averted which the computer is convinced of the futility of war... is decently realistic. For unusual values of "realistic."

Really?

[Ltap]

While the age of hackers in movies seems to have increased lately (Die Hard 4, the most braindead one yet when you ignore television shows them as paranoid 20-somethings), they aren't shown as particularly mature.

Re:Really?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I guess I don't really help out with stopping the stereotype though. I often answer with "FM Principal" (F*cking Magic) when I fix something and don't know what exactly the fix was

Ah, the Proximity Of Genius effect ("hey it suddenly works now you're here") and it's dark-side equivalent the Gabriel Effect.

Re:Really?

[Ltap]

Not really. It depends on what you're doing, but an activity being criminal doesn't necessarily make it bad. Most of the less mature and less dedicated ones tend to give up when they fail to achieve some ideal they imagined. The rest either use it as a means to an end or do it for the sake of finding things out.

Obligatory

[srussia]

If we are going to stare at a screen for two hours we want eye candy.

I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head...

Re:Obligatory

[FrostedWheat]

Hmm.. I must be looking at the wrong Perl program, all I saw was a big beardie guy.

Re:Obligatory

[Sechr Nibw]

No, you need to get one of those matte finish monitors, the anti-glare. You're just seeing your reflection in the monitor. It's been awhile since you showered and shaved, so you probably don't recognize him.

50 years?

[Nukenbar]

Who had hacker movies in 1960? Can anyone name a hacker movie off the top of his head before War Games?

Re:50 years?

[EMB Numbers]

"Colossus: The Forbin Project"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/

An artificially intelligent supercomputer is developed and activated, only to reveal that it has a sinister agenda of its own. The scientists scramble to hack into it.

Re:50 years?

[piltdownman84]

Who had hacker movies in 1960? Can anyone name a hacker movie off the top of his head before War Games?

The Original Italian Job from 1969. In that movie they hack the traffic computer in Turin to create a traffic nightmare allowing them to escape in their Mini Coopers.

Sneakers

[jgtg32a]

Sneakers is the best hacking movie ever.

Re:Sneakers

[evilviper]

Sneakers is the best hacking movie ever.

"War Games"

Serious subject.
Culturally significant.
Perhaps the most realistic "hacking" in Hollywood history.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Dated today, but holds up very well.

Re:Sneakers

[Chris Burke]

Except it wasn't silly, it was one of the best examples of defeating a computer through logic ever. It wasn't just some self-contradictory piece of logic that made Joshua go into an infinite loop or go offline while saying "does not compute". It was a challenge to beat itself at Tic-Tac-Toe with a lesson which Joshua learned and then intuitively applied to Thermonuclear War. It wasn't a logic-bomb, it was logic. Joshua learned that nuclear war was futile.

Compare with all the examples from E.g. Star Trek where the contradictory logic causes the computers to fail.

Personally, I think that trope page should list Wargames as averting the trope. :P

Re:Sneakers

[Idiomatick]

Hackers 1 had topless Lara Croft .. I mean Angelina Jolie in it. So I dunno what you are talking about.

Re:Sneakers

[sootman]

The best hacking films are...

• 1983 - War Games - realistic depiction of old-school hacking
• 1992 - Sneakers - realistic depiction of social engineering
• 1995 - Hackers - Agelina Jolie briefly topless
• 2001 - Swordfish - long scene of Halle Berry topless

The best hacking film of all time, therefore, is Swordfish, followed by a two-way tie between War Games and Sneakers. Hackers comes in fourth--not even a naked 19-year-old Angelina Jolie could save that piece of shit. :-)

UNIX

[CAIMLAS]

The only instance of 'movie hackers' which spring to mind is:

"It's a UNIX system! I know this! "

Still waiting on my blowjob

[Chas]

Seriously. I wanna know where you go for a job interview that tests you under pressure (excuse the pun) of a blowjob.

I'd apply in a heartbeat.

Several times.

A day!

Re:Search burbling, no cursors, huge fonts

[mcgrew]

I try to allow for artistic license, but real computers DON'T MAKE CUTE R2D2 NOISES WHEN THEY'RE SEARCHING!

Well, they CAN, you know, if you want them to. I once had a boss named Dave and changed all his Windows sounds to samples of HAL from 2001. "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that."

Now, how do you portray "hacking" well on TV?

[Opportunist]

Thanks for all the rants how Hollywood seriously crashes and burns when it comes to "sensible" display of hacking, how it is constantly a firework of flahy graphics and nonsensical flicker output... But, well, how else do you want to do it?

Your goal, when making a movie, is to show something that the viewer wants to see. Hacking is not exactly a spectator sport. What do you see? Some guy, reading various boards, hunting for new 0days, trying stuff against his own server (again, text only, why bother writing a graphical frontend... because none exists since, well, what you're doing SHOULD not work and is certainly not the "normal flow of operation"), then, when it's time to actually pry the juicy server open it's again a few tools and their text output that tells the (informed) hacker which exploit might work, he prods again, maybe gets some garbled output, then a few lines of scp and a few (textual) progress bars...

I think if you want to show hackers sensibly, the only way is the same you see in medical series: Concentrate on something other than the "actual" work. How often do you actually get to see some doctors operate? An operation can take hours, yet you might see a minute or so of OP time in a show, if that. The focus is elsewhere, and there's a really good reason why: You, the viewer, without a medical background, could not tell a healthy liver from one that's gonna blow in a minute anyway. You would not "get" why everyone's getting hectic even though there isn't a geyser of blood squirting from the patient's belly. Likewise, the whole "shit hits the fan and everything starts flashing" crap should be canned in favor of one of the hackers telling the viewer why hell breaks lose (to give a reason just why he explains it, have one of the non-tech guys with them so there's a reason he tells the viewer how his friend just stumbled over a tripwire in the server security) and put the focus elsewhere in your story.

Sorry, there is no "good" way to show hacking as entertaining to watch and realistic too. It just isn't interesting to watch a hacker do his magic when you have no idea what's going on. A few lines of "realistic" stuff are fine if they're there to build tension. A blinking caret can be a great cliffhanger when the audience gets explained that the next output will make or break their run.