That Hackers Hacking Scene May Not Be So Dumb After All

Is there a screen trope simultaneously more loved and reviled than real-time hacking? Not a chance. From the early 1980s, movies and TV shows have developed a seemingly endless appetite for scrolling gibberish, 3D interfaces, pop-up windows, and other kinds of eye candy that scream L33T H4X0R ATTEMPT UNDERWAY. But now, on the latest episode of Technique Critique, security researcher Samy Kamkar blazes a trail of destruction through the chicanery, diagnosing what each famous sequence gets right—or, as is much more likely, wrong.

All the classics are here: Swordfish. The Net. Hackers. Skyfall. Tron: Legacy. They range from utter crap (Swordfish and its reliance on fancy visual interfaces) to maybe not as utterly crap as we assumed (Hackers may feature a gratuitous flame war between Crash Override and Acid Burn, but as Kamkar points out, patching a target to foil other hackers while leaving a back door for yourself is actually a valid technique) to being decent enough for a participation trophy (Skyfall gets credit for including the idea of polymorphic code, but demerits for including invalid hexadecimal code.) But for each one of those, there's a surprising example of truth and accuracy—like Wargames ’80s-faithful move of dialing directly into a school's admin systems like a BBS, or Mr. Robot's portrayal of a hospital that runs its security on a hopelessly outmatched Windows 95 machine.

Of course, those aren't even half of the shows and movies that Kamkar dissects and explains. And none of those are the clunker that makes him laugh, look hopelessly offscreen, and say "I don't know what we want to say about this. No more pop-up windows!" Enjoy his bemused befuddlement—and relive some of hilarious hacking sequences ever—in the video above.

CULTURE