September 7, 2016 • 44 mins
Hacking isn't as glamorous or exciting as movies and television make it seem. Shannon Morse joins the show to talk about the worst examples of hacking in films and TV.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in text with technology with tex Stuff from stuff
dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm
your host, Jonathan Strickland and joining me today over several
nodes so I can't actually track her real whereabouts. Shannon Morse, Hi,
(00:28):
how are you doing? I'm great, but you're just you're
so crazy with the hacks. You're so so good at
typing random strings on your keyboard and and always one
step ahead of me. Well, you know, if you've ever
visited hacker typer dot net, I believe it is you
will know exactly how to hack excellent. I'm glad that.
I'm glad now because I've been wondering for years. Guys.
(00:51):
We've had Shannon on the show a few times, and
today it's a real treat, really because we're gonna talk
about some examples of hacking in pop culture and some
of the ones that are incredibly awful, just terrible inaccurate
ways of showing how hacking works, as well as talk
about something to get it more right than not right,
(01:14):
which is kind of awesome. And I mean the start off,
we have to admit the real world of hacking, while
the results can be quite dramatic and have a huge effect.
The process itself is not always cinematic. Nope, it is not.
(01:34):
It's actually pretty boring. There's just a bunch of text
on the screen and that's about it, right, Yeah, I
mean it's it's it's coding, right, yeah, exactly. There's a
lot of coding involved, a lot of Python and BASS
scripts and things of that nature, and a lot of
terminal work. So you don't see very much gooey or
graphical user interface usage whenever you're running some kind of
(01:56):
hack implementation. A lot of times it's just terminal, right,
And you know, I understand the need to stretch the
truth when you're trying to create a really thrilling movie
or TV show and you want to have something interesting
to look at, having your characters look at lines of
code and going through a process of trying to uh
(02:20):
to to create some sort of exploit for a vulnerability
that doesn't really hold a lot of people like on
the edge of their seat. So I get it, but
it is kind of a problem. And I should also
mention we're using the word hacker today a lot. But
of course, as I try to mention every time I
talk about hacking, hacking is a very broad term, and
(02:44):
it doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing anything illegal,
and it certainly doesn't even mean that you're necessarily working
on a computer. You could be doing some hardware hacks
that aren't related to software. Uh, that's important to remember.
But but as far as Hollywood has can certain there's
really only one kind of hacking, and that involves trying
to break into a place that you're not supposed to
(03:06):
be in. Of course, because those are the most interesting people,
they're the scary ones, and people are afraid of what
they don't understand, right, And I imagine that a lot
of screenwriters are particularly scared of hackers because it's one
it's clear that they have no understanding whatsoever about it.
(03:26):
And two, I mean we've seen, especially recently, we've seen
some very big stories about uh, the entertainment industry running
running away from hackers attacking. And whether it's a hacker
who's actually gaining access to a system, or it was
someone who was on the inside who just managed to
exploit their access in the first place, which I would
(03:49):
argue really isn't a hack, it's just kind of industrial
sabotage at that point. But the Sony story would be
the big example, right. Yeah, the Sony story, I think
put a lot of fear in the entertainment industry. And
I feel like the entertainment industry as a whole, with
very few exceptions, are one of the genres that is
(04:10):
the farthest behind when it comes to their own security
and privacy. Uh, They're they're the farthest behind when it
comes to a lot of things, including how they treat
their women. But I think that it's something that they
really need to start focusing on and start understanding, not
only for their own security, like with for their employees,
for the actors and actresses that work there for these
(04:32):
different companies, but also because they need to understand how
to actually portray it so that more people understand it
as a whole and aren't so afraid. Right, And so
we're going to dive into a discussion of some of
the more entertaining and often wildly inaccurate versions of hacking
(04:53):
in film and TV. I should also give a shout out.
A lot of people on my Twitter feed suggested that
I check out a subreddit. The subreddit is it's a
Unix system, which is a reference to Jurassic Park. Uh,
if you remember the young lady runs up to a computer,
she takes one look at it. She says, it's a
unique system. I know this, And then she's immediately looking
(05:17):
at a graphic user interface and identifying one block out
of like fifty blocks that are on the screen and
immediately makes the conclusion that all the files for the
entire island are accessible from that one terminal. I don't
know how she knows that. Um, that's amazing. It's amazing
that you can you you automatically know that everything available
(05:38):
on the island is on that one drive. Somehow, I
feel like the only way you would know that it
is if you were the information security professional that is
working for that company. Was not, you know, she she didn't,
just something like she was a little too young to
be in a full time employee at that point. So
(05:58):
Jurassic Park, while it lends the the the quote it's
a unique system to the sub credit, I didn't really
included on this list. There is one other incredibly famous
example that I've talked about on a previous episode Tech Stuff,
that we will hit. But first I'm gonna talk about
a movie. I haven't actually seen this movie, but I
(06:18):
have seen the sequences that involve hacking. That movie is
the Core And in the first sequence I wanted to
talk about, there's a character whose handle is RAT, which
could be you know, like remote access trojan or remote
access terminal, depending upon what acronym you want to look at.
Often one that is associated with hacking, and RAT is
(06:42):
caught by the FBI. The sequence in which he's caught,
he's trying desperately to erase all traces of his activities.
He's got tons and tons of computers, and he's using
massive magnets to try and wipe drives, and he's throwing
CD ROM disks into a microwave and turn to get
on high you know, the typical stuff we do when
(07:04):
the Feds come knocking. Uh. But but my favorite bit
about this little sequence is he then has taken to
an interrogation and as he's being interrogated, he just casually
reaches over and grabs a guy's cell phone out of
his little holster or his pocket or whatever. But the
guy's it's just a cell phone. What can he do
with that? Well, Shannon, you know what people can do
(07:28):
with so I mean, if you have physical access to
a cell phone, it's game over. But but but what
what this guy does. He doesn't do something to get
hold of the guy's contacts. He doesn't. And this is
also pre smartphone. It's really a cell phone. He doesn't
do anything like that. What he does is he takes
a little um, a little chewing gum rapper, He dials
(07:51):
a couple of numbers on the phone, and then he
uses the chewing gum rapper to make a weird little whistling,
humming noise, and then casually this is the phone, tosses
it back to the guy and says that phone's got
free long distance on it forever. I love to real life,
(08:12):
that's exactly how it works. Yeah, totally. So I'm pretty
sure that this is kind of a comparison to what
people would actually do, which was called phone freaking. And
this was like before hacking became a really big popular
norm that you would see in like online media that
you see in this day. So back in the day,
(08:35):
this guy named Captain Crunch he got his online screen
name from opening up a Captain Crunch cereal box and
getting out a little I believe it was a kazoo
or something similar to that, and he was able to
recreate or reproduce the kind of tone that you could
put into a pay phone to allow you to make
free long distance calls. So they're using that real life
(08:59):
scenario to their advantage in this this movie the Core
and making it seem like you can do the same
thing with a gum wrapper. Now, personally, I don't believe
that you can do the same thing with a gum wrapper.
That seems a little bit odd. I know that you
can make noises with things like that. You can also
do the same thing with a piece of grass if
you want to. Yeah, you can. You can entertain yourself
(09:20):
in like a third grade kind of way for hours
at a time. But yeah, phone freaking really worked on landlines.
They worked when the phone system wasn't fully digital yet.
It was a much different system. I mean there and
there's some very famous people who got their start as
phone freaks. I mean, Steve Wozniak was in that world.
(09:42):
The great was was one of the freakers of back
in the seventies and uh, but it was it was
sort of the same thing that you would talk about
hackers today. They weren't necessarily trying to gain the system.
They were trying to figure out, how does this work, right,
They were just messing with things. They were trying to
reverse engineer them and figure out how they work and
(10:05):
put them back together and let them let these different
pieces of technology do things that they weren't necessarily supposed
to do. And that's what I love so much about hacking.
But then you bring it to Hollywood and they're like, oh,
these are scary people. They're all going to end up
in the FBI's hands. And that's not necessarily true, right,
And and to to take something that worked on landlines
(10:25):
on a pay phone basis using a whistle that had
I think he even modified it slightly so it would
make exactly the tone he needed to replicate the tones
that the phone company was using in order to allow
for this kind of thing to happen. Yeah, it would
never work on the cell phone range at all. So
and and also just just what a weird line like
(10:46):
this phone's got free long distance on it forever, and
you think there's gotta be multiple ways a phone company
would say, Hey, something weird is going on with this
one line. But but the Core, the Core also has
another great scene in it with that same hacker, same
guy rat Uh And when I see him I always think, uh,
(11:10):
he's he's the he's a character who also or he's
an actor who also shows up as a character on
the show UM Supernatural as a weird, reedy looking uh
demon killer guy that you would just expect to get
completely obliterated the first time he shows up, but he
turns out to be more capable than you would consider
(11:31):
based upon his appearance. Anyway, he walks into a cyber cafe.
He's got a CD rom Uh, I think it even
says Kung Fu on it, if I'm not mistaken, and
he puts it, puts it into a cyber cafe computer,
and after like leaning back and putting his hand up
to his face for about five seconds, it ends up
(11:56):
completely taking over not just his computer, but the entire
local network, and all of the screens in the cyber
cafe pop up with this image of his rat network
where he has taken over all the computers. I don't
even know exactly why he's trying to take over all
the computers, apart from just seeing lots and lots of uh,
(12:18):
what appears to be news footage which spoiler alert, there's
a thing we can use to get that news footage.
It's called a TV. You can use that without having
to hack any systems. But uh, it's it's just a
weird little moment where he's taken over all the computers
in the cyber cafe. Now, let's let's go ahead and
(12:39):
make some things clear, Shannon. I know that you've addressed
this on on multiple episodes and and other ways of
reaching out to your audience. There are certain things you
should be concerned about when you go and log into
any kind of local area network, UM, any kind of
open WiFi. If you're going to a coffee shop and
(13:02):
you're using that kind of WiFi, you need to be
more um aware of potential security problems. Yes, absolutely, it's
it's very easy if you're on your local coffee shops
network or your locals hotels network for anybody to snoop
on what you're doing. Uh, you may be using HTTPS,
(13:23):
but that's not going to keep somebody for understanding what
sites you are visiting. But even though that data may
be encrypted, however, they're still collecting that encrypted information. And
it really just depends on how a website that you're
visiting is encrypting that information, whether or not they would
be able to decrypt it. After a specific amount of time.
(13:44):
So I always tell people if they're going to use
a you know, hotel WiFi or a coffee shop WiFi,
to use a VPN, use some way to tunnel your
traffic from point A to point B so that nobody
else on that network will be able to see what
you're doing. They may see that your dogged on, they
may see your IP address, but they won't know exactly
what's going on with your traffic while you're connected. So,
(14:07):
and I'm pretty sure that everybody who generally uses these
WiFi networks that are available for free aren't necessarily using VPNs,
But it's it's a huge security risk for pretty much
every consumer out there that's using these WiFi networks, right
and whereas in the core, you know we were talking,
(14:27):
it's it's really hardwired computers that are part of the
cyber cafe. You just sit down at a terminal and
log in so that you have access to everything on
that machine. That's scary too. I mean it's it's kind
of like using a computer at the library. You want
to be very careful about the kinds of activities you
do on that machine, um, because it's not really yours
and you don't really you know, and you don't want
(14:50):
to go so far to cover your tracks that you're
actually causing problems for the real purpose of that machine. Uh.
It's still not quite sure what he was trying to do.
It was like he was setting up his own a
botan net. Also, if you are sitting of a buttonet,
probably a bad idea to have a graphic pop up
on everyone's screen saying, hey, your computer's mind now. Yeah.
So it's in today's age, it is very popular for
(15:14):
people to use ransomware, which will basically announce it's it's
availability on your computer. Yeah, it'll announce its presence on
your machine to let the user know, Hey, I've just
encrypted all the information, all the photos, all the documents
that is on your computer. Now you have to pay
me like one bitcoin to get your data back. And
(15:35):
then you pay that bitcoin and you may or may
not get your data back. So, you know, ransomware it's
a big thing. But in the case of this one,
in the case of rat yes, you can install like
malware or something like that on a c D. That's
entirely possible. You can put pretty much anything on a CD. Uh,
And then it looks like he's he's running this CD
(15:55):
through the entire network, which you can install malware through
pivot and a networks open ports or open eyedps so
that you can put the same hour on several different computers.
But it's it's never a good idea to let everybody
know what the heck you're doing, if you're doing something
that you shouldn't necessarily be doing in the first place. Yeah,
(16:17):
I mean again, it's it's there for dramatic effect. But
if you're the one person in the cyber cafe who
isn't visibly freaking out when all the computers switch over,
here's a here's a little hint, they're going to figure
out it was you, right, I mean that, that's kind
of like, if you're the one guy not surprised that
everything's on fire, you probably set the fire. I'm just saying.
(16:42):
Our next example comes from one of my favorite movies
of all time. Oh my gosh, me too. I love
this movie. Yes, Oh, it's so great. It's so cheesy
and wonderful. The Net Also is a is a movie
in which a character actually has her identity stolen, and
very prescient for its time. It's not like it got
(17:02):
everything wrong. Some of the stuff and actually predicted quite well.
For example, best prediction of any movie ever it predicted
being able to order pizza online. This was before the
dot com bubble even began. This The movie came out
in the mid nineties, so this was actually pretty advanced.
They they the people behind the film, said, we wanted
(17:25):
to be able to let our character make an activity
online that would stress how she was uh distancing herself
from other people. She was trying her best to limit
the amount of interaction she had with other human beings.
It stresses her loneliness, also her paranoia, uh to some extent,
(17:46):
and and it was a neat way of doing it,
and it also ended up being accurate. However, that being said,
there's a bit in the very beginning. It's right when
she's going to order pizza. When she's on the phone
with a client she does essentially text support and really
helps people who have been attacked by a virus recover
(18:06):
their systems. Uh. And it takes her like no time
at all to identify what the virus is on this
customer's computer, which which she does not have access to.
She's she's she's accessing it remotely. She identifies the virus,
She sequesters the virus, she removes the virus, plus apparently
does repairs to the system, so it goes so it
(18:27):
starts working again, and that takes her less time than
it would take for her to order the pizza. That's incredible.
I mean, she should Every security firm should hire her.
She's a genius apparently. So so I like making the
comparison between Sandra Bullock's character in the Net to an
(18:47):
actual penetration tester that we have in the two thousands
or in the tens, in the twenty tens. Penetration testers
go through contracts. They go through a company. They're usually
hired on by a large firm to go through their
security and make sure everything's okay. They have to write reports,
everything has to go through a financial financialist before they're
(19:10):
actually paid for any of their work. They don't actually
discuss how much they're getting paid with the client. They
discuss how much they're getting paid with the company that
they are salaried through. So in the case of Sandra
Bullocks character here she's talking about you know, oh yeah,
he's like, yeah, I'm gonna you know, pay X amount
(19:31):
of money, and he's like, I don't care how much
it costs. It's worth it. And that's not necessarily something
that you would talk to the penetration tester about, because
when you do, they're going to make their they're going
to make their time with you as a client much
longer to make it seem like a much more important case. Yeah,
so if you if you do, uh, you know, it's
kind of like what Scotty would say is that he'd
(19:53):
say he'd figure out how long it was going to
take him to do a task, and then he would
then he would give the captain a time that was
longer than what it would take him to do. In
that case, it wasn't so that he could get over time.
It was so that he could impress the captain by
finishing early. Right. It was like, I told you it
was gonna take me three days, but I really put
(20:13):
my nose to the grindstone and got it done in
a day and a half and the captain's impressed, like, Wow,
you're amazing. In this case, it would be yeah, that's
probably gonna take me. You know, I don't know a
week's worth of work and you're done in you know,
five hours, then you're just billing the time, right, So,
so during this conversation that these too have, it sounds
(20:34):
like she's a like she's a red teamer, Like she's
a penetration tester that works for a big security firm,
and she's she's talking to her client though. Uh, but
but her actions make me think that she's a freelancer.
So I'm not sure what's going on here. I think
that the that it was produced a little bit confusingly. Um,
but now that I understand how penetration testing works, even
(20:57):
though I am not one myself, I was quite confused
by this scene. Yeah, I I I think it was.
Out of all the errors that we're talking about today,
it's one of the less egregious because, again, unless you
were to show like that time had obviously passed a
significant amount so that she had had time to really
identify what was happening and then respond to it. Uh,
(21:21):
it's not that big a deal compared to some of
the other versions that we've got in this episode. So
I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna give this one a pass.
It's not as bad as it could have been. It's
certainly not as bad as the next one. Oh my gosh,
can you just talk about n C I S. Yeah,
let's talk about n C I S for a bit, because, uh,
(21:41):
you know n C I S. First of all, it
has one of the most infamous awful hacking scenes in Hollywood,
and so much so that that there are multiple versions
of the clip we're gonna talk about on YouTube, my
favorite titled to Idiots One Keyboard. But yeah, let's talk
(22:02):
about n C I S for a second here. So
we've got we've got a character in n C I
S who is sort of she's the the young hip
hacker character who uh is the one responding in this
particular scene to an attack that's coming in that attack
is being represented by lots and lots of pop ups
(22:23):
of just strings of characters meaninglessly appearing all over her
her computer monitor, and her response is that each one
of these is absolutely meaningful, and she knows exactly what's happening,
that the hacker is attacking their systems and trying to
get at very uh very secure data and is quickly
(22:46):
winnowing through all the different security and so she's just
furiously typing on her keyboard in response, and her co
worker who's standing next to her and asking her questions
and giving her suggestions that don't necessarily mean very much,
ends up deciding to help her out by simultaneously typing
on the same keyboard. Chese typing on So you have
(23:08):
four hands typing on the same keyboard at the same time.
Dear Hollywood, that is not how keyboards work. A computer
can't tell which person is typing which thing. It would
just come out as a super garbled mess. Not to
mention the frustration, like have you ever had somebody come
(23:29):
up and just like start pressing keys on your keyboard,
because it's very irritating. It is. There's no way that
these two characters would be able to type on the
same keyboard at the same time. That's ridiculous. It feels
like a violation when someone does that to me, Like
like if they if they're like move, even if it
if it, if it's preceded by move, I'll show you.
I'm like, no, no, you'll tell me and then I'll
(23:52):
do it. This is my computer and I don't let
you touch it. Yeah. This was one of those sequences
where really the whole purpose of the scene was to
show how a non tech savvy, pragmatic guy has a
solution to a problem that the two tech wizards completely overlook.
So in a way, it's it's about taking down the
(24:16):
tech wizard folks a peg or two because they're not
thinking practically, they're too filled with panic. So you've got
these two characters who are responding in real time to
a security threat as if they're doing battle with the hacker.
And this is a common thread in a lot of
television and movies. It's not terribly accurate in the real
(24:37):
world scenarios, but they are. They're acting like the keystrokes
they're doing are going to end up either booting the
hacker out or securing some of the data away from
the hacker, and they're just furiously typing when the pragmatic
guy walks behind the computer system and unplugs it, thus
saving them from the hack because now there's no connection
(25:00):
and for the hacker to exploit. Except what he did
was actually make it worse because now they don't have
a computer that they can work through to hopefully, uh
find the hack, find the open port that this guy
is coming through, this attacker and close it off. So
he's unplugging a computer as opposed to going to the
(25:22):
server and cutting that off and turning off the server.
He's just unplugging one of the open PCs, right, and
that just drives me nuts. This and Okay, I wanted
to throw things at my TV when I was watching
this scene because I was like, this is so bad.
It's so bad. Yeah, this one, this one's probably out
of all the ones that we have, this was probably
(25:43):
maybe not the worst, but it's way up there, and
it's it's it's clearly played for laughs, at least a
little bit for laughs. Maybe not like outright belly laughs,
like you know, anyone who knows what a computer is
is probably chuckling, but it's obviously played for this little
moment where the pragmatic character can kind of be a
(26:05):
smug jerk face like huh see I thought of it first,
and the other two characters like why didn't we think
of that? And as as Shannon points out, because it
doesn't solve the problem, No, it does not. Yeah. I
I highly recommend if anyone is unfamiliar with this, go
look for in C. I s who it hits one
(26:26):
keyboard and watched this scene and really appreciate it. I
also liked when I was reading comments about this one
of the comments I read in that subreddit was. The
part of the scene that completely pulls me out of
it is the fact that when the guy takes a
bite of a sandwich, it's such a tiny little bite.
It lost it lost all credibility with me. There No
one needs a sandwich like that. Oh that's so funny.
(26:49):
Creditors are great. Um. Now. Next on our list is Swordfish,
which actually has quite a few awful, awful hacking scenes,
some of which involved material not appropriate for this podcast,
and so I did not include those scenes when I wrote.
There's one in particular where a guy is being tested
(27:10):
to see if his hacking skills are leite enough to join.
It is awful. It is terrible in so many ways.
But that one was so bad that I was like, no,
I can't, that's not going on the list. So instead
I looked at a different one. And Hugh Jackman's playing
the hacker and he's trying to get access to a system,
(27:32):
and the way that they decided to depict this was
they show a little cube on the screen and he's
building onto this cube with other cubes to make what
looks like essentially a Rubik's Cube sized digital construct. It's
all virtual. There's no actual physical cubes, and this is
what represents getting access to a system somehow building a
(27:55):
three dimensional virtual object out of smaller three dimensional virtual objects. Now, Shannon,
is that in fact, how that that looks like when
you're trying to access a system you are confronted with
a Rubik's cube that you have to construct virtually. Yeah,
so I'm gonna say, uh no, So for me, this
(28:17):
looks like they are trying to show their viewers a
graphical compilation of what coding would look like once you
finally finally compile your code and you get the a
okay that everything is okay and there are no errors.
So that's what it looks like to me. Um, if
you see actual code, if you see somebody building a
virus or building a worm, or like in this case,
(28:40):
Hugh Jackman's character is building worm, you'll see lines and
line hundreds of lines of code, and then at the
end they'll probably choose like go into the gooey and
choose to compile code, and then the interface that they're
using will give them the okay and tell them that
there are no errors. But in this case, he's building
a Rubik's cube on is computer and it looks nothing
(29:01):
like what actual compilation looks like. Yeah, yeah, compiling code
is uh. So to give to give you guys a
little bit of an insight into how computers quote unquote think.
We use computer languages in order to construct programs, and
the computer languages are written in such a way that
a computer understands what operation it needs to perform in
(29:23):
order to progress through the program. Ultimately, that stuff gets
compiled and you have like high level computer languages and
low level computer languages, uh and then you eventually get
down to the point where you get to machine code,
and that's where you're getting into the binary codes zeros
and ones, where most humans, the vast majority of humans,
(29:45):
nearly all humans, are not capable of reading that, at
least at least not with a whole lot of time
on their hands. So that's why we have these programming
languages to kind of bridge the gap between the language
that computers eek and the languages that we speak. So,
if you're completely unfamiliar with coding languages or programming languages
(30:06):
and you take a look at it, it looks like nonsense, right,
and it for someone who is completely unschooled, it looks
like you would have to be a genius in order
to use it. But in fact, it follows very specific rules.
So once you learn those rules, you know, it does
take there is a learning curve, but you do get
to a point where you start feeling a little confident
with that stuff exactly. And there's plenty of programmers that
(30:30):
I know who never learn every single rule in a
specific language that they know, but they they have books
and books, they have you know, definitions and posters and
things of this nature so that they always have a reminder,
so they're able to write different kinds of programs. But
as long as you know a few general rules for
(30:50):
any language that you're working with, you can write a program.
It's it's very hard, it is very complicated, but it's possible. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's not like you're building a cube, unless, of course,
your program, once executed, is a cube building program, in
which case, if it looks like you're building a cube,
(31:10):
congratulations you coded it correctly, um. But other otherwise that's
not gonna happen. Our next one is one of my
favorite examples of bad hacking because it takes me back
to my childhood. I had a discussion with some of
my my co workers here about this particular movie, and
some of them couldn't remember ever seeing it. Some of
them remembered seeing it as a kid on video. I
(31:32):
remember seeing this in the theater because I'm old. Superman three.
So in Superman three, you've got uh character played by
Richard Pryor who is a computer programmer, and he goes
to work for a company and he's a he's a
data entry guy. For some reason, the data entry folks
at this company all have to wear like slippers and stuff.
(31:53):
It's almost like it's a clean room, like kind of
a clean room, but not really a clean room. And
he finds out that everyone in the company is paid
their Their payment involves fractions of assent that end up
getting rounded down. So if this sounds like office space,
it's very much the same sort of blood. He figures out, Hey,
(32:13):
what if I took all the fractions of assent that
otherwise go unaccounted. They're just floating around out there, and
I pay myself all those fractions of assent so that
I make a real huge amount of money, because once
you accumulate all of them, it actually amounts to something's significant.
But because each individual little appearance of it. It's tiny,
(32:36):
no one takes notice of it. Right Like if I
if I took a halfpenny, no one is going to care.
If I take a billion halfpennies, suddenly it matters. But
he does this by staying late one day and turning
on his computer and he does type some stuff with
one hand on a little bitty keyboard that uh, then
(33:00):
I'll makes texts start to disappear and appear like one
letter at a time, to a point where it's a
very common thing in Hollywood, right that the display has
some sort of weird effect to it that indicates that, yes,
something is happening, like a hacker is attacking or the
system is being compromised. Um. Once he does that, he
(33:24):
types in a command that essentially just says, hey, pay
all the fractions of a cent to me, and it's
written out in more or less natural language, and then
he hits enter and it works. A lot of problems
with this, the big one being natural language. Like we
just said just a second ago, computers do not understand
(33:45):
the languages that we communicate with to each other, not
not on their own. They have to be taught how
to do that. They're not. They don't automatically speak English. Yeah,
if you ever open up a command line on any
kind of computer, doesn't matter what operating system pick one,
whether it's Linux or DOS or whatever. You get to
(34:06):
that command line and you try and type in full
English sentences to see if you can make your computer
to do stuff, You're gonna be sorely disappointed. It doesn't
work that way. It's not like a search bar with Google.
I mean, the Web has really spoiled us, and that
anyone who has not had experience with computers before the
(34:28):
Web was a thing doesn't really understand that when you
get to the command line, it's not like a search
field like you're not You're not Gooey has spoiled us. Yes, yeah,
I um side note again, I'm old enough where Doss
was the way to interface with a computer when I
(34:49):
was a kid, or Apple Basic, but I was mostly
using Doss at that point. And then uh, you had
the Mac come out in four they took the gooey.
They didn't gate the gooey, the graphic user interface. They
actually kind of took that from Xerox Park. Xerox Park
really kind of pioneered that. Then Microsoft came out with
(35:09):
Windows and I resisted switching to Windows for a very
long time, and eventually broke down to get Windows when
it became clear that all the software coming out only
would be supported through Windows and not through DOSS. And
to this day, I'm bitter about that because I taught
(35:31):
myself all the Tree commands. Darn it. I grew up
with Windows since I was a kid, so it was
always I started in the gooey graphical user in a phase.
I didn't start with commands. But this is where Shannon
makes me feel old. Yeah, I was born in the eighties,
so I think that's the difference. That's that's that's fair.
That's fair. Go ahead. I I love you too, Shannon.
(35:54):
It's fine. Every every every co host I have makes
me feel old because I'm older than everyone but one
podcaster at this company. So continue. So I actually liked
this Superman three scene because back in the day before
I was born, Uh, it was very popular among um
(36:18):
people all over the place, no matter what company you
were working with, to deal with fractions of a penny,
because even a penny as a change in pricing would
be a lot of money. So people would be like, Okay,
well it's a penny and a half, and I believe
at one point there was even a half cent coin
(36:39):
that was distributed in the United States. So this was
a thing. You can still see it in this day
and age at gas stations. Whenever you go to a
gas station, you see on the sign it says like
gases to and nine tenths of a of a penny.
That's that's a that's from back in the day. One
day would use these exact precise measurements for gasoline distribution
(37:01):
at gas stations. So so that really is a thing. Um.
But the whole hacking scenario of this scene is very false.
You you can't do a specific distribution of money in
that nature, and anybody who has access to that kind
of information who is working for a company should not
(37:24):
have that access in the first pace, especially if they're
they're getting paid and they're not like a a chief
operating manager of that company. Right. Yeah, it's the the
idea that you would have these dumb terminals, like I
am assuming they were dumb terminals. I'm assuming they were
all connected to a main system as opposed to each
(37:47):
being individual computers. But either in either case you would
have limitations on what any of those terminals could access,
but because of his leap programming skills, he's able to
bypass that and get access to the main frame. I'm
pretty sure they use it as a main frame. Mainframe,
by the way, is also a great general term that
(38:08):
Hollywood has misused throughout all the computer films. But uh,
it's one of those things that's never explained how he
does it. It's just a it's just a thing that
happens in the movie. Uh, doesn't you know. They're not
drawing attention to it. It's not an important thing other
than the fact to illustrate that one. He is smart too.
(38:29):
He doesn't see anything ethically wrong with bending the rules
because in his mind, these fractions of assent, they're not
doing anything right. They're not they're not in an account,
they're not being used by the company. They're just they're
just kind of loose somehow. They're they're they're in the
company's ownership, but no one's doing anything with it. So therefore,
(38:50):
if no one's doing anything with it, no one's gonna
miss them when they're gone. So that's kind of how
he justifies it, and eventually he becomes one of the
he's more of a reluctant villain in the movie. But
he's one of the villains in Superman three. That's a
if you have not seen Superman three, good job. Continue
on that track. Don't feel tempted to change that. It
(39:12):
is not a good movie. It's better than Superman four,
although my coworker Joe would probably trounce me for saying so, uh,
super Superman four is awful. Um the next movie. The
next example we have is Numbers, which I love just
because of the way it mischaracterizes I r C. Which is,
(39:32):
there's a scene in which people are trying to figure
out what these what these hackers, these two different hackers
are trying to do, and they don't know, and they
aren't sure how they're going to track down the hackers
and learn what they're trying to do. But then one
of the characters says, oh, we gotta go on I
r C because that's where all the hackers go to chat.
And they use handles. You know, they don't use the
(39:54):
real name they use. They use handles on I r C.
And that way they can secretly chat to each other.
And then they use this weird meaningless analogy talking about
two ships that are sailing across the ocean, and they
meet in the middle of the ocean and they exchange
illegal goods and then they sail away, and because the
(40:14):
wake of a ship fades so quickly, they leave no
trace behind. That's the same thing as I r C.
They actually do this whole sequence where that that ship
analogy I just talked about is visualized on screen, because folks,
I r C is boring, Like showing I r C
on screen is incredibly dull, So it's way more exciting
(40:36):
to have a visualization of a meaningless ship analogy. Yeah,
IRC is super boring to look at, but it's very fun.
You can make lots of friends in I r C,
so it's it is called Internet relay chat, so that
is a sure thing. People do use LEAs fat Lee
speak in I r C, even though leap speak is
(40:57):
not that hard to read and her Phinian going into
the ships made absolutely no sense to me as an
IRC user, because when I pop into I r C
and then when I leave, my chats are still there,
and they are still there for anybody to see who
was also logged in at the same time. So saying
(41:18):
that they disappear after x amount of time is not
necessarily true, because anybody with a very very simple script
can capture everything that was said in an I R
C for X amount of time, for whatever time that
they want to save a file four, and then they
can upload that file anywhere that they want to. So
that this information disappears is completely false. I love that
(41:39):
there's a I'm pretty sure it's the same one. I'm
not watching the clips as I'm going through them, so
I'm not entirely certain, but I think there's a moment
in this where they have a desperate like take a screenshot,
take a screen shot, and she does it like at
the last second before the connection is broken. And I
was laughing so hard that the idea of oh, yeah,
(42:00):
you gotta take a screen shutter it's gone forever. Um, Yeah,
it's it's pretty ridiculous. And and there is a funny
little exchange where where the lady says like they'll be
speaking in lete, but don't worry, I also speak let
like like, oh, screenwriter, you're so adorable son. Yeah. Le
(42:21):
it's easy to speak, so anybody can do it. Yeah,
I mean it's it's really it's really just replacing certain
characters with other characters. That look similar to the ones
you were replacing, and then sometimes purposefully misspelling words because
someone some at some point misspelled things people thought was
funny and they went with it, like pone pone is
a great example. P w N. It's supposed to be owned,
(42:43):
but someone just in a typo and then that typo
became the word yep. That's the lovely thing about it, guys.
Shannon and I had so much to say about how
Hollywood portrays hackers that we went on for quite some time.
So we're gonna divide up the episodes and we're gonna
(43:04):
end part one here. The whole thing has already been recorded,
but next week you'll get part two where we talk
more about some of the bad examples of hacking in
Hollywood as well as some of the good ones. So
make sure you tune in and check that out. Also,
if you want to follow Shannon on Twitter, her handle
is at snubs that's s n U b s. And
(43:25):
if you want to find her other work, it's amazing stuff,
you can just go to hack five dot org. That's
h a K the number five dot org. And I'll
talk to you guys again really soon for more on
(43:45):
this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff works.
Dot com
Get in text with technology with tex Stuff from stuff
dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm
your host, Jonathan Strickland and joining me today over several
nodes so I can't actually track her real whereabouts. Shannon Morse, Hi,
(00:28):
how are you doing? I'm great, but you're just you're
so crazy with the hacks. You're so so good at
typing random strings on your keyboard and and always one
step ahead of me. Well, you know, if you've ever
visited hacker typer dot net, I believe it is you
will know exactly how to hack excellent. I'm glad that.
I'm glad now because I've been wondering for years. Guys.
(00:51):
We've had Shannon on the show a few times, and
today it's a real treat, really because we're gonna talk
about some examples of hacking in pop culture and some
of the ones that are incredibly awful, just terrible inaccurate
ways of showing how hacking works, as well as talk
about something to get it more right than not right,
(01:14):
which is kind of awesome. And I mean the start off,
we have to admit the real world of hacking, while
the results can be quite dramatic and have a huge effect.
The process itself is not always cinematic. Nope, it is not.
(01:34):
It's actually pretty boring. There's just a bunch of text
on the screen and that's about it, right, Yeah, I
mean it's it's it's coding, right, yeah, exactly. There's a
lot of coding involved, a lot of Python and BASS
scripts and things of that nature, and a lot of
terminal work. So you don't see very much gooey or
graphical user interface usage whenever you're running some kind of
(01:56):
hack implementation. A lot of times it's just terminal, right,
And you know, I understand the need to stretch the
truth when you're trying to create a really thrilling movie
or TV show and you want to have something interesting
to look at, having your characters look at lines of
code and going through a process of trying to uh
(02:20):
to to create some sort of exploit for a vulnerability
that doesn't really hold a lot of people like on
the edge of their seat. So I get it, but
it is kind of a problem. And I should also
mention we're using the word hacker today a lot. But
of course, as I try to mention every time I
talk about hacking, hacking is a very broad term, and
(02:44):
it doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing anything illegal,
and it certainly doesn't even mean that you're necessarily working
on a computer. You could be doing some hardware hacks
that aren't related to software. Uh, that's important to remember.
But but as far as Hollywood has can certain there's
really only one kind of hacking, and that involves trying
to break into a place that you're not supposed to
(03:06):
be in. Of course, because those are the most interesting people,
they're the scary ones, and people are afraid of what
they don't understand, right, And I imagine that a lot
of screenwriters are particularly scared of hackers because it's one
it's clear that they have no understanding whatsoever about it.
(03:26):
And two, I mean we've seen, especially recently, we've seen
some very big stories about uh, the entertainment industry running
running away from hackers attacking. And whether it's a hacker
who's actually gaining access to a system, or it was
someone who was on the inside who just managed to
exploit their access in the first place, which I would
(03:49):
argue really isn't a hack, it's just kind of industrial
sabotage at that point. But the Sony story would be
the big example, right. Yeah, the Sony story, I think
put a lot of fear in the entertainment industry. And
I feel like the entertainment industry as a whole, with
very few exceptions, are one of the genres that is
(04:10):
the farthest behind when it comes to their own security
and privacy. Uh, They're they're the farthest behind when it
comes to a lot of things, including how they treat
their women. But I think that it's something that they
really need to start focusing on and start understanding, not
only for their own security, like with for their employees,
for the actors and actresses that work there for these
(04:32):
different companies, but also because they need to understand how
to actually portray it so that more people understand it
as a whole and aren't so afraid. Right, And so
we're going to dive into a discussion of some of
the more entertaining and often wildly inaccurate versions of hacking
(04:53):
in film and TV. I should also give a shout out.
A lot of people on my Twitter feed suggested that
I check out a subreddit. The subreddit is it's a
Unix system, which is a reference to Jurassic Park. Uh,
if you remember the young lady runs up to a computer,
she takes one look at it. She says, it's a
unique system. I know this, And then she's immediately looking
(05:17):
at a graphic user interface and identifying one block out
of like fifty blocks that are on the screen and
immediately makes the conclusion that all the files for the
entire island are accessible from that one terminal. I don't
know how she knows that. Um, that's amazing. It's amazing
that you can you you automatically know that everything available
(05:38):
on the island is on that one drive. Somehow, I
feel like the only way you would know that it
is if you were the information security professional that is
working for that company. Was not, you know, she she didn't,
just something like she was a little too young to
be in a full time employee at that point. So
(05:58):
Jurassic Park, while it lends the the the quote it's
a unique system to the sub credit, I didn't really
included on this list. There is one other incredibly famous
example that I've talked about on a previous episode Tech Stuff,
that we will hit. But first I'm gonna talk about
a movie. I haven't actually seen this movie, but I
(06:18):
have seen the sequences that involve hacking. That movie is
the Core And in the first sequence I wanted to
talk about, there's a character whose handle is RAT, which
could be you know, like remote access trojan or remote
access terminal, depending upon what acronym you want to look at.
Often one that is associated with hacking, and RAT is
(06:42):
caught by the FBI. The sequence in which he's caught,
he's trying desperately to erase all traces of his activities.
He's got tons and tons of computers, and he's using
massive magnets to try and wipe drives, and he's throwing
CD ROM disks into a microwave and turn to get
on high you know, the typical stuff we do when
(07:04):
the Feds come knocking. Uh. But but my favorite bit
about this little sequence is he then has taken to
an interrogation and as he's being interrogated, he just casually
reaches over and grabs a guy's cell phone out of
his little holster or his pocket or whatever. But the
guy's it's just a cell phone. What can he do
with that? Well, Shannon, you know what people can do
(07:28):
with so I mean, if you have physical access to
a cell phone, it's game over. But but but what
what this guy does. He doesn't do something to get
hold of the guy's contacts. He doesn't. And this is
also pre smartphone. It's really a cell phone. He doesn't
do anything like that. What he does is he takes
a little um, a little chewing gum rapper, He dials
(07:51):
a couple of numbers on the phone, and then he
uses the chewing gum rapper to make a weird little whistling,
humming noise, and then casually this is the phone, tosses
it back to the guy and says that phone's got
free long distance on it forever. I love to real life,
(08:12):
that's exactly how it works. Yeah, totally. So I'm pretty
sure that this is kind of a comparison to what
people would actually do, which was called phone freaking. And
this was like before hacking became a really big popular
norm that you would see in like online media that
you see in this day. So back in the day,
(08:35):
this guy named Captain Crunch he got his online screen
name from opening up a Captain Crunch cereal box and
getting out a little I believe it was a kazoo
or something similar to that, and he was able to
recreate or reproduce the kind of tone that you could
put into a pay phone to allow you to make
free long distance calls. So they're using that real life
(08:59):
scenario to their advantage in this this movie the Core
and making it seem like you can do the same
thing with a gum wrapper. Now, personally, I don't believe
that you can do the same thing with a gum wrapper.
That seems a little bit odd. I know that you
can make noises with things like that. You can also
do the same thing with a piece of grass if
you want to. Yeah, you can. You can entertain yourself
(09:20):
in like a third grade kind of way for hours
at a time. But yeah, phone freaking really worked on landlines.
They worked when the phone system wasn't fully digital yet.
It was a much different system. I mean there and
there's some very famous people who got their start as
phone freaks. I mean, Steve Wozniak was in that world.
(09:42):
The great was was one of the freakers of back
in the seventies and uh, but it was it was
sort of the same thing that you would talk about
hackers today. They weren't necessarily trying to gain the system.
They were trying to figure out, how does this work, right,
They were just messing with things. They were trying to
reverse engineer them and figure out how they work and
(10:05):
put them back together and let them let these different
pieces of technology do things that they weren't necessarily supposed
to do. And that's what I love so much about hacking.
But then you bring it to Hollywood and they're like, oh,
these are scary people. They're all going to end up
in the FBI's hands. And that's not necessarily true, right,
And and to to take something that worked on landlines
(10:25):
on a pay phone basis using a whistle that had
I think he even modified it slightly so it would
make exactly the tone he needed to replicate the tones
that the phone company was using in order to allow
for this kind of thing to happen. Yeah, it would
never work on the cell phone range at all. So
and and also just just what a weird line like
(10:46):
this phone's got free long distance on it forever, and
you think there's gotta be multiple ways a phone company
would say, Hey, something weird is going on with this
one line. But but the Core, the Core also has
another great scene in it with that same hacker, same
guy rat Uh And when I see him I always think, uh,
(11:10):
he's he's the he's a character who also or he's
an actor who also shows up as a character on
the show UM Supernatural as a weird, reedy looking uh
demon killer guy that you would just expect to get
completely obliterated the first time he shows up, but he
turns out to be more capable than you would consider
(11:31):
based upon his appearance. Anyway, he walks into a cyber cafe.
He's got a CD rom Uh, I think it even
says Kung Fu on it, if I'm not mistaken, and
he puts it, puts it into a cyber cafe computer,
and after like leaning back and putting his hand up
to his face for about five seconds, it ends up
(11:56):
completely taking over not just his computer, but the entire
local network, and all of the screens in the cyber
cafe pop up with this image of his rat network
where he has taken over all the computers. I don't
even know exactly why he's trying to take over all
the computers, apart from just seeing lots and lots of uh,
(12:18):
what appears to be news footage which spoiler alert, there's
a thing we can use to get that news footage.
It's called a TV. You can use that without having
to hack any systems. But uh, it's it's just a
weird little moment where he's taken over all the computers
in the cyber cafe. Now, let's let's go ahead and
(12:39):
make some things clear, Shannon. I know that you've addressed
this on on multiple episodes and and other ways of
reaching out to your audience. There are certain things you
should be concerned about when you go and log into
any kind of local area network, UM, any kind of
open WiFi. If you're going to a coffee shop and
(13:02):
you're using that kind of WiFi, you need to be
more um aware of potential security problems. Yes, absolutely, it's
it's very easy if you're on your local coffee shops
network or your locals hotels network for anybody to snoop
on what you're doing. Uh, you may be using HTTPS,
(13:23):
but that's not going to keep somebody for understanding what
sites you are visiting. But even though that data may
be encrypted, however, they're still collecting that encrypted information. And
it really just depends on how a website that you're
visiting is encrypting that information, whether or not they would
be able to decrypt it. After a specific amount of time.
(13:44):
So I always tell people if they're going to use
a you know, hotel WiFi or a coffee shop WiFi,
to use a VPN, use some way to tunnel your
traffic from point A to point B so that nobody
else on that network will be able to see what
you're doing. They may see that your dogged on, they
may see your IP address, but they won't know exactly
what's going on with your traffic while you're connected. So,
(14:07):
and I'm pretty sure that everybody who generally uses these
WiFi networks that are available for free aren't necessarily using VPNs,
But it's it's a huge security risk for pretty much
every consumer out there that's using these WiFi networks, right
and whereas in the core, you know we were talking,
(14:27):
it's it's really hardwired computers that are part of the
cyber cafe. You just sit down at a terminal and
log in so that you have access to everything on
that machine. That's scary too. I mean it's it's kind
of like using a computer at the library. You want
to be very careful about the kinds of activities you
do on that machine, um, because it's not really yours
and you don't really you know, and you don't want
(14:50):
to go so far to cover your tracks that you're
actually causing problems for the real purpose of that machine. Uh.
It's still not quite sure what he was trying to do.
It was like he was setting up his own a
botan net. Also, if you are sitting of a buttonet,
probably a bad idea to have a graphic pop up
on everyone's screen saying, hey, your computer's mind now. Yeah.
So it's in today's age, it is very popular for
(15:14):
people to use ransomware, which will basically announce it's it's
availability on your computer. Yeah, it'll announce its presence on
your machine to let the user know, Hey, I've just
encrypted all the information, all the photos, all the documents
that is on your computer. Now you have to pay
me like one bitcoin to get your data back. And
(15:35):
then you pay that bitcoin and you may or may
not get your data back. So, you know, ransomware it's
a big thing. But in the case of this one,
in the case of rat yes, you can install like
malware or something like that on a c D. That's
entirely possible. You can put pretty much anything on a CD. Uh,
And then it looks like he's he's running this CD
(15:55):
through the entire network, which you can install malware through
pivot and a networks open ports or open eyedps so
that you can put the same hour on several different computers.
But it's it's never a good idea to let everybody
know what the heck you're doing, if you're doing something
that you shouldn't necessarily be doing in the first place. Yeah,
(16:17):
I mean again, it's it's there for dramatic effect. But
if you're the one person in the cyber cafe who
isn't visibly freaking out when all the computers switch over,
here's a here's a little hint, they're going to figure
out it was you, right, I mean that, that's kind
of like, if you're the one guy not surprised that
everything's on fire, you probably set the fire. I'm just saying.
(16:42):
Our next example comes from one of my favorite movies
of all time. Oh my gosh, me too. I love
this movie. Yes, Oh, it's so great. It's so cheesy
and wonderful. The Net Also is a is a movie
in which a character actually has her identity stolen, and
very prescient for its time. It's not like it got
(17:02):
everything wrong. Some of the stuff and actually predicted quite well.
For example, best prediction of any movie ever it predicted
being able to order pizza online. This was before the
dot com bubble even began. This The movie came out
in the mid nineties, so this was actually pretty advanced.
They they the people behind the film, said, we wanted
(17:25):
to be able to let our character make an activity
online that would stress how she was uh distancing herself
from other people. She was trying her best to limit
the amount of interaction she had with other human beings.
It stresses her loneliness, also her paranoia, uh to some extent,
(17:46):
and and it was a neat way of doing it,
and it also ended up being accurate. However, that being said,
there's a bit in the very beginning. It's right when
she's going to order pizza. When she's on the phone
with a client she does essentially text support and really
helps people who have been attacked by a virus recover
(18:06):
their systems. Uh. And it takes her like no time
at all to identify what the virus is on this
customer's computer, which which she does not have access to.
She's she's she's accessing it remotely. She identifies the virus,
She sequesters the virus, she removes the virus, plus apparently
does repairs to the system, so it goes so it
(18:27):
starts working again, and that takes her less time than
it would take for her to order the pizza. That's incredible.
I mean, she should Every security firm should hire her.
She's a genius apparently. So so I like making the
comparison between Sandra Bullock's character in the Net to an
(18:47):
actual penetration tester that we have in the two thousands
or in the tens, in the twenty tens. Penetration testers
go through contracts. They go through a company. They're usually
hired on by a large firm to go through their
security and make sure everything's okay. They have to write reports,
everything has to go through a financial financialist before they're
(19:10):
actually paid for any of their work. They don't actually
discuss how much they're getting paid with the client. They
discuss how much they're getting paid with the company that
they are salaried through. So in the case of Sandra
Bullocks character here she's talking about you know, oh yeah,
he's like, yeah, I'm gonna you know, pay X amount
(19:31):
of money, and he's like, I don't care how much
it costs. It's worth it. And that's not necessarily something
that you would talk to the penetration tester about, because
when you do, they're going to make their they're going
to make their time with you as a client much
longer to make it seem like a much more important case. Yeah,
so if you if you do, uh, you know, it's
kind of like what Scotty would say is that he'd
(19:53):
say he'd figure out how long it was going to
take him to do a task, and then he would
then he would give the captain a time that was
longer than what it would take him to do. In
that case, it wasn't so that he could get over time.
It was so that he could impress the captain by
finishing early. Right. It was like, I told you it
was gonna take me three days, but I really put
(20:13):
my nose to the grindstone and got it done in
a day and a half and the captain's impressed, like, Wow,
you're amazing. In this case, it would be yeah, that's
probably gonna take me. You know, I don't know a
week's worth of work and you're done in you know,
five hours, then you're just billing the time, right, So,
so during this conversation that these too have, it sounds
(20:34):
like she's a like she's a red teamer, Like she's
a penetration tester that works for a big security firm,
and she's she's talking to her client though. Uh, but
but her actions make me think that she's a freelancer.
So I'm not sure what's going on here. I think
that the that it was produced a little bit confusingly. Um,
but now that I understand how penetration testing works, even
(20:57):
though I am not one myself, I was quite confused
by this scene. Yeah, I I I think it was.
Out of all the errors that we're talking about today,
it's one of the less egregious because, again, unless you
were to show like that time had obviously passed a
significant amount so that she had had time to really
identify what was happening and then respond to it. Uh,
(21:21):
it's not that big a deal compared to some of
the other versions that we've got in this episode. So
I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna give this one a pass.
It's not as bad as it could have been. It's
certainly not as bad as the next one. Oh my gosh,
can you just talk about n C I S. Yeah,
let's talk about n C I S for a bit, because, uh,
(21:41):
you know n C I S. First of all, it
has one of the most infamous awful hacking scenes in Hollywood,
and so much so that that there are multiple versions
of the clip we're gonna talk about on YouTube, my
favorite titled to Idiots One Keyboard. But yeah, let's talk
(22:02):
about n C I S for a second here. So
we've got we've got a character in n C I
S who is sort of she's the the young hip
hacker character who uh is the one responding in this
particular scene to an attack that's coming in that attack
is being represented by lots and lots of pop ups
(22:23):
of just strings of characters meaninglessly appearing all over her
her computer monitor, and her response is that each one
of these is absolutely meaningful, and she knows exactly what's happening,
that the hacker is attacking their systems and trying to
get at very uh very secure data and is quickly
(22:46):
winnowing through all the different security and so she's just
furiously typing on her keyboard in response, and her co
worker who's standing next to her and asking her questions
and giving her suggestions that don't necessarily mean very much,
ends up deciding to help her out by simultaneously typing
on the same keyboard. Chese typing on So you have
(23:08):
four hands typing on the same keyboard at the same time.
Dear Hollywood, that is not how keyboards work. A computer
can't tell which person is typing which thing. It would
just come out as a super garbled mess. Not to
mention the frustration, like have you ever had somebody come
(23:29):
up and just like start pressing keys on your keyboard,
because it's very irritating. It is. There's no way that
these two characters would be able to type on the
same keyboard at the same time. That's ridiculous. It feels
like a violation when someone does that to me, Like
like if they if they're like move, even if it
if it, if it's preceded by move, I'll show you.
I'm like, no, no, you'll tell me and then I'll
(23:52):
do it. This is my computer and I don't let
you touch it. Yeah. This was one of those sequences
where really the whole purpose of the scene was to
show how a non tech savvy, pragmatic guy has a
solution to a problem that the two tech wizards completely overlook.
So in a way, it's it's about taking down the
(24:16):
tech wizard folks a peg or two because they're not
thinking practically, they're too filled with panic. So you've got
these two characters who are responding in real time to
a security threat as if they're doing battle with the hacker.
And this is a common thread in a lot of
television and movies. It's not terribly accurate in the real
(24:37):
world scenarios, but they are. They're acting like the keystrokes
they're doing are going to end up either booting the
hacker out or securing some of the data away from
the hacker, and they're just furiously typing when the pragmatic
guy walks behind the computer system and unplugs it, thus
saving them from the hack because now there's no connection
(25:00):
and for the hacker to exploit. Except what he did
was actually make it worse because now they don't have
a computer that they can work through to hopefully, uh
find the hack, find the open port that this guy
is coming through, this attacker and close it off. So
he's unplugging a computer as opposed to going to the
(25:22):
server and cutting that off and turning off the server.
He's just unplugging one of the open PCs, right, and
that just drives me nuts. This and Okay, I wanted
to throw things at my TV when I was watching
this scene because I was like, this is so bad.
It's so bad. Yeah, this one, this one's probably out
of all the ones that we have, this was probably
(25:43):
maybe not the worst, but it's way up there, and
it's it's it's clearly played for laughs, at least a
little bit for laughs. Maybe not like outright belly laughs,
like you know, anyone who knows what a computer is
is probably chuckling, but it's obviously played for this little
moment where the pragmatic character can kind of be a
(26:05):
smug jerk face like huh see I thought of it first,
and the other two characters like why didn't we think
of that? And as as Shannon points out, because it
doesn't solve the problem, No, it does not. Yeah. I
I highly recommend if anyone is unfamiliar with this, go
look for in C. I s who it hits one
(26:26):
keyboard and watched this scene and really appreciate it. I
also liked when I was reading comments about this one
of the comments I read in that subreddit was. The
part of the scene that completely pulls me out of
it is the fact that when the guy takes a
bite of a sandwich, it's such a tiny little bite.
It lost it lost all credibility with me. There No
one needs a sandwich like that. Oh that's so funny.
(26:49):
Creditors are great. Um. Now. Next on our list is Swordfish,
which actually has quite a few awful, awful hacking scenes,
some of which involved material not appropriate for this podcast,
and so I did not include those scenes when I wrote.
There's one in particular where a guy is being tested
(27:10):
to see if his hacking skills are leite enough to join.
It is awful. It is terrible in so many ways.
But that one was so bad that I was like, no,
I can't, that's not going on the list. So instead
I looked at a different one. And Hugh Jackman's playing
the hacker and he's trying to get access to a system,
(27:32):
and the way that they decided to depict this was
they show a little cube on the screen and he's
building onto this cube with other cubes to make what
looks like essentially a Rubik's Cube sized digital construct. It's
all virtual. There's no actual physical cubes, and this is
what represents getting access to a system somehow building a
(27:55):
three dimensional virtual object out of smaller three dimensional virtual objects. Now, Shannon,
is that in fact, how that that looks like when
you're trying to access a system you are confronted with
a Rubik's cube that you have to construct virtually. Yeah,
so I'm gonna say, uh no, So for me, this
(28:17):
looks like they are trying to show their viewers a
graphical compilation of what coding would look like once you
finally finally compile your code and you get the a
okay that everything is okay and there are no errors.
So that's what it looks like to me. Um, if
you see actual code, if you see somebody building a
virus or building a worm, or like in this case,
(28:40):
Hugh Jackman's character is building worm, you'll see lines and
line hundreds of lines of code, and then at the
end they'll probably choose like go into the gooey and
choose to compile code, and then the interface that they're
using will give them the okay and tell them that
there are no errors. But in this case, he's building
a Rubik's cube on is computer and it looks nothing
(29:01):
like what actual compilation looks like. Yeah, yeah, compiling code
is uh. So to give to give you guys a
little bit of an insight into how computers quote unquote think.
We use computer languages in order to construct programs, and
the computer languages are written in such a way that
a computer understands what operation it needs to perform in
(29:23):
order to progress through the program. Ultimately, that stuff gets
compiled and you have like high level computer languages and
low level computer languages, uh and then you eventually get
down to the point where you get to machine code,
and that's where you're getting into the binary codes zeros
and ones, where most humans, the vast majority of humans,
(29:45):
nearly all humans, are not capable of reading that, at
least at least not with a whole lot of time
on their hands. So that's why we have these programming
languages to kind of bridge the gap between the language
that computers eek and the languages that we speak. So,
if you're completely unfamiliar with coding languages or programming languages
(30:06):
and you take a look at it, it looks like nonsense, right,
and it for someone who is completely unschooled, it looks
like you would have to be a genius in order
to use it. But in fact, it follows very specific rules.
So once you learn those rules, you know, it does
take there is a learning curve, but you do get
to a point where you start feeling a little confident
with that stuff exactly. And there's plenty of programmers that
(30:30):
I know who never learn every single rule in a
specific language that they know, but they they have books
and books, they have you know, definitions and posters and
things of this nature so that they always have a reminder,
so they're able to write different kinds of programs. But
as long as you know a few general rules for
(30:50):
any language that you're working with, you can write a program.
It's it's very hard, it is very complicated, but it's possible. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's not like you're building a cube, unless, of course,
your program, once executed, is a cube building program, in
which case, if it looks like you're building a cube,
(31:10):
congratulations you coded it correctly, um. But other otherwise that's
not gonna happen. Our next one is one of my
favorite examples of bad hacking because it takes me back
to my childhood. I had a discussion with some of
my my co workers here about this particular movie, and
some of them couldn't remember ever seeing it. Some of
them remembered seeing it as a kid on video. I
(31:32):
remember seeing this in the theater because I'm old. Superman three.
So in Superman three, you've got uh character played by
Richard Pryor who is a computer programmer, and he goes
to work for a company and he's a he's a
data entry guy. For some reason, the data entry folks
at this company all have to wear like slippers and stuff.
(31:53):
It's almost like it's a clean room, like kind of
a clean room, but not really a clean room. And
he finds out that everyone in the company is paid
their Their payment involves fractions of assent that end up
getting rounded down. So if this sounds like office space,
it's very much the same sort of blood. He figures out, Hey,
(32:13):
what if I took all the fractions of assent that
otherwise go unaccounted. They're just floating around out there, and
I pay myself all those fractions of assent so that
I make a real huge amount of money, because once
you accumulate all of them, it actually amounts to something's significant.
But because each individual little appearance of it. It's tiny,
(32:36):
no one takes notice of it. Right Like if I
if I took a halfpenny, no one is going to care.
If I take a billion halfpennies, suddenly it matters. But
he does this by staying late one day and turning
on his computer and he does type some stuff with
one hand on a little bitty keyboard that uh, then
(33:00):
I'll makes texts start to disappear and appear like one
letter at a time, to a point where it's a
very common thing in Hollywood, right that the display has
some sort of weird effect to it that indicates that, yes,
something is happening, like a hacker is attacking or the
system is being compromised. Um. Once he does that, he
(33:24):
types in a command that essentially just says, hey, pay
all the fractions of a cent to me, and it's
written out in more or less natural language, and then
he hits enter and it works. A lot of problems
with this, the big one being natural language. Like we
just said just a second ago, computers do not understand
(33:45):
the languages that we communicate with to each other, not
not on their own. They have to be taught how
to do that. They're not. They don't automatically speak English. Yeah,
if you ever open up a command line on any
kind of computer, doesn't matter what operating system pick one,
whether it's Linux or DOS or whatever. You get to
(34:06):
that command line and you try and type in full
English sentences to see if you can make your computer
to do stuff, You're gonna be sorely disappointed. It doesn't
work that way. It's not like a search bar with Google.
I mean, the Web has really spoiled us, and that
anyone who has not had experience with computers before the
(34:28):
Web was a thing doesn't really understand that when you
get to the command line, it's not like a search
field like you're not You're not Gooey has spoiled us. Yes, yeah,
I um side note again, I'm old enough where Doss
was the way to interface with a computer when I
(34:49):
was a kid, or Apple Basic, but I was mostly
using Doss at that point. And then uh, you had
the Mac come out in four they took the gooey.
They didn't gate the gooey, the graphic user interface. They
actually kind of took that from Xerox Park. Xerox Park
really kind of pioneered that. Then Microsoft came out with
(35:09):
Windows and I resisted switching to Windows for a very
long time, and eventually broke down to get Windows when
it became clear that all the software coming out only
would be supported through Windows and not through DOSS. And
to this day, I'm bitter about that because I taught
(35:31):
myself all the Tree commands. Darn it. I grew up
with Windows since I was a kid, so it was
always I started in the gooey graphical user in a phase.
I didn't start with commands. But this is where Shannon
makes me feel old. Yeah, I was born in the eighties,
so I think that's the difference. That's that's that's fair.
That's fair. Go ahead. I I love you too, Shannon.
(35:54):
It's fine. Every every every co host I have makes
me feel old because I'm older than everyone but one
podcaster at this company. So continue. So I actually liked
this Superman three scene because back in the day before
I was born, Uh, it was very popular among um
(36:18):
people all over the place, no matter what company you
were working with, to deal with fractions of a penny,
because even a penny as a change in pricing would
be a lot of money. So people would be like, Okay,
well it's a penny and a half, and I believe
at one point there was even a half cent coin
(36:39):
that was distributed in the United States. So this was
a thing. You can still see it in this day
and age at gas stations. Whenever you go to a
gas station, you see on the sign it says like
gases to and nine tenths of a of a penny.
That's that's a that's from back in the day. One
day would use these exact precise measurements for gasoline distribution
(37:01):
at gas stations. So so that really is a thing. Um.
But the whole hacking scenario of this scene is very false.
You you can't do a specific distribution of money in
that nature, and anybody who has access to that kind
of information who is working for a company should not
(37:24):
have that access in the first pace, especially if they're
they're getting paid and they're not like a a chief
operating manager of that company. Right. Yeah, it's the the
idea that you would have these dumb terminals, like I
am assuming they were dumb terminals. I'm assuming they were
all connected to a main system as opposed to each
(37:47):
being individual computers. But either in either case you would
have limitations on what any of those terminals could access,
but because of his leap programming skills, he's able to
bypass that and get access to the main frame. I'm
pretty sure they use it as a main frame. Mainframe,
by the way, is also a great general term that
(38:08):
Hollywood has misused throughout all the computer films. But uh,
it's one of those things that's never explained how he
does it. It's just a it's just a thing that
happens in the movie. Uh, doesn't you know. They're not
drawing attention to it. It's not an important thing other
than the fact to illustrate that one. He is smart too.
(38:29):
He doesn't see anything ethically wrong with bending the rules
because in his mind, these fractions of assent, they're not
doing anything right. They're not they're not in an account,
they're not being used by the company. They're just they're
just kind of loose somehow. They're they're they're in the
company's ownership, but no one's doing anything with it. So therefore,
(38:50):
if no one's doing anything with it, no one's gonna
miss them when they're gone. So that's kind of how
he justifies it, and eventually he becomes one of the
he's more of a reluctant villain in the movie. But
he's one of the villains in Superman three. That's a
if you have not seen Superman three, good job. Continue
on that track. Don't feel tempted to change that. It
(39:12):
is not a good movie. It's better than Superman four,
although my coworker Joe would probably trounce me for saying so, uh,
super Superman four is awful. Um the next movie. The
next example we have is Numbers, which I love just
because of the way it mischaracterizes I r C. Which is,
(39:32):
there's a scene in which people are trying to figure
out what these what these hackers, these two different hackers
are trying to do, and they don't know, and they
aren't sure how they're going to track down the hackers
and learn what they're trying to do. But then one
of the characters says, oh, we gotta go on I
r C because that's where all the hackers go to chat.
And they use handles. You know, they don't use the
(39:54):
real name they use. They use handles on I r C.
And that way they can secretly chat to each other.
And then they use this weird meaningless analogy talking about
two ships that are sailing across the ocean, and they
meet in the middle of the ocean and they exchange
illegal goods and then they sail away, and because the
(40:14):
wake of a ship fades so quickly, they leave no
trace behind. That's the same thing as I r C.
They actually do this whole sequence where that that ship
analogy I just talked about is visualized on screen, because folks,
I r C is boring, Like showing I r C
on screen is incredibly dull, So it's way more exciting
(40:36):
to have a visualization of a meaningless ship analogy. Yeah,
IRC is super boring to look at, but it's very fun.
You can make lots of friends in I r C,
so it's it is called Internet relay chat, so that
is a sure thing. People do use LEAs fat Lee
speak in I r C, even though leap speak is
(40:57):
not that hard to read and her Phinian going into
the ships made absolutely no sense to me as an
IRC user, because when I pop into I r C
and then when I leave, my chats are still there,
and they are still there for anybody to see who
was also logged in at the same time. So saying
(41:18):
that they disappear after x amount of time is not
necessarily true, because anybody with a very very simple script
can capture everything that was said in an I R
C for X amount of time, for whatever time that
they want to save a file four, and then they
can upload that file anywhere that they want to. So
that this information disappears is completely false. I love that
(41:39):
there's a I'm pretty sure it's the same one. I'm
not watching the clips as I'm going through them, so
I'm not entirely certain, but I think there's a moment
in this where they have a desperate like take a screenshot,
take a screen shot, and she does it like at
the last second before the connection is broken. And I
was laughing so hard that the idea of oh, yeah,
(42:00):
you gotta take a screen shutter it's gone forever. Um, Yeah,
it's it's pretty ridiculous. And and there is a funny
little exchange where where the lady says like they'll be
speaking in lete, but don't worry, I also speak let
like like, oh, screenwriter, you're so adorable son. Yeah. Le
(42:21):
it's easy to speak, so anybody can do it. Yeah,
I mean it's it's really it's really just replacing certain
characters with other characters. That look similar to the ones
you were replacing, and then sometimes purposefully misspelling words because
someone some at some point misspelled things people thought was
funny and they went with it, like pone pone is
a great example. P w N. It's supposed to be owned,
(42:43):
but someone just in a typo and then that typo
became the word yep. That's the lovely thing about it, guys.
Shannon and I had so much to say about how
Hollywood portrays hackers that we went on for quite some time.
So we're gonna divide up the episodes and we're gonna
(43:04):
end part one here. The whole thing has already been recorded,
but next week you'll get part two where we talk
more about some of the bad examples of hacking in
Hollywood as well as some of the good ones. So
make sure you tune in and check that out. Also,
if you want to follow Shannon on Twitter, her handle
is at snubs that's s n U b s. And
(43:25):
if you want to find her other work, it's amazing stuff,
you can just go to hack five dot org. That's
h a K the number five dot org. And I'll
talk to you guys again really soon for more on
(43:45):
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