Jermiah Robinson
March 12th, 2024
CYSE 201S – Cybersecurity
The Average Movie Hackers V.S. Now
Cybercriminals in older movies normally displays hackers as typing very quickly into command prompts with green text and sending lines of code at very quick speeds with special glasses and stickers all over…However, when comparing actual hacking to movie hacking, this is not the case at all when looking at it from reality standpoint. Procedures are much different than simply plugging the computer in and typing code. There are multiple safeguards, firewalls, etc. and much more needs to be done to open a door compared to the seconds in movies.
Keren Elazari from Insider goes into greater detail about hacking in movies compared to reality. When looking at a movie like Skyfall (2012), she immediately mentions the point that computers gathered from cybercriminals are not immediately brought to a conference room and plugged in as this is a major risk and could lead to systems or documents being compromised just from having it connected. Instead, the computer is brought over to a lab and is then evaluated to see what it will do. Even as she stated, an X-Ray would be a much better thing to do before plugging it in as these computers can be trapped by the cybercriminal in case things go south.
Further on, movies make cybercriminals working on code to be easy and simple. A quick process and it can instantly bypass safeguards. Reading and understanding the code as well does not take a single second, but potentially minutes or hours to understand what to do as a hacker. However, this is much more amplified as hackers are met with numerous ways to stop them when trying to hack into hardware or software. Things like antiviruses, encryption, etc. prevent access from unauthorized users which can take even more time to get around to try and run code. Along with this, normally most doors who are being compromised will let out an alarm, notifying security nearby.
When comparing the movies to now, media has influenced cybersecurity attacks to be extremely fast paced and quick with coding and. However even then, it still takes time to understand the attack. Learning what the code is doing, developing a plan to stop it, and implementing it takes far more time than what is seen in movies. Later, however as seen in The Matrix, Hollywood has started to understand what really is hacking and has been developing a new understanding of it, creating a much bigger difference between the old and new by even showing tools that hackers will use.
In conclusion, being an actual hacker is much harder than what is shown in movies. It takes time to read and create the code, to get around safeguards and encryption and to even be able to run it as well without any detection from outsides sources would take much more time. Hollywood is till understanding hackers and what they do, but in recent media, they are learning much more about it compared to previous old movies where it was simply typing fast.
Works Cited
Insider (2021, March 16). Hacker Rates 12 Hacking Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6BqpU4V0Ypk