What's your favorite hacker movie?

[TheCotMan]

Re: What's your favorite hacker movie?

In no particular order:

23 - Nichts ist so wie es scheint: This includes some footage of what conventions can really be like. People bring some favorite home-built project, or backwoods-ghetto-style hardware toy and show it off to other people. Some people play games. Some people socialize. It shows a tendency to not trust the media, while some seem to like the spotlight. It shows people being boastful about what they can do, even though they know they really can't do it, and how deception among such people between each other often ends poorly. It shows people "selling-out" and people keeping their values. It shows 10+ people bunking in the same hotel room, and issues with things like telephone charges in the room. It shows people sleeping outside, and amusing pranks. There is a great deal of fiction included in this, but some on-screen code provides "pseudo-code" examples of a Trojan Horse to grab passwords from people logging in to machines.
It really isn't about hacking, but is a telling of the other side of the story to Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage and the lesser known The KGB, the Computer and Me. Though "23" is based on a true story, some artistic licensing takes place on actual events, and some characters in the story are aggregations of several real-life people.

The Constant Gardener : Which wasn't really a hacker movie, but included, "hacking." I find it silly when movies like Swordfish show characters breaking crypto with arbitrarily sized keys in seconds. If they want to show something believable, why don't they show the, "hacker," finding a vulnerability in the implementation instead of having some magic ability to visualize fancy special effects with a greenscreen, or projected onto their faces. A thread about this movie is here (THIS THREAD ALSO HAS SPOILERS).

SPOILER -- SKIP TO "END SPOILER" if you don't want a spoiler.

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In this movie, there is a scene where some files are protected through encryption, and the main character talks with his friend who, "just happens to have a kid that can probably break into the protected files." They visit this guy's kid, and he says something like, "Oh yeah. This will be easy." At this point, I am beginning to roll my eyes... they are going to do it again... NO. The kid says something like, "Of course it will be easy. I set this up for her, and know the passphrase she used." HAH! Now that is more realistic. Someone doesn't know how to protect data asks someone else for help. The person t hat helps them may even help them with a passphrase if they are not very good with computers.


END SPOILER



GATTACA: This was a good "hacker" film, as it showed futuristic security systems using biometrics, and low-tech methods to bypass them.

Horse Feathers (1927) -- The Marx Brothers: This film has a scene with a person guarding a door to a bar with a secret passphrase, and another person trying to get in. The password to gain access through the door is rumored to be the reason for the naming of another movie that was not a good hacker movie, in my opinion.

There are more, but I don't have time.

Related Thread:
Worst Hacker Movies

[BeefyMcNasty]

Re: What's your favorite hacker movie?

I always thought that Wargames best captured the true mentality of a hacker. One of curiosity and a desire to learn. I also like the scenes where David is doing research on the man behind the system, trying to find a backdoor. That was a lot better presentation of hacking technique than a bunch of random formulas and symbols flying across a screen as some chumps sits behind an 8 inch monitor with sunglasses on in a pitch dark room.

Sneakers was pretty good.

Die Hard 4 was entertaining, but I kind of like it when movies stay true to technology.

Not so much about hacking but I thought Antitrust was pretty good.

[theprez98]

Re: What's your favorite hacker movie?

In no particular order, except for #1 ;-)

1. Sneakers
WarGames
The Conversation
Swordfish
Matrix (only the first)

For the same reasons as "Cyberpunk" I also like "Takedown"; I don't necessarily agree with the facts, but the movie itself is entertaining.

Haven't seen Die Hard 4 yet, but have heard some decent reviews of it.

[DJ Jackalope]

Re: What's your favorite hacker movie?

"The Conversation" with Gene Hackman

Ok. Hackman. No pun intended there.

Followed by, "It's Unix! I know this!"'

[Greyhatter]

Ok, my turn since we've covered the best book, the worst security, and took another shot at "what a hacker might be?"

I have a hard time with this one myself, but I think that "The Conversation" with Gene Hackman may be at the top of my list followed by "Sneakers" and "The Net">for obvious hot reasons here. When I was younger "War Games" was cool, (is there nothing Ally Sheedy can't do?) and it still gets my accolades for a great storyline.