Watch this video and pay attention to the way that movies distort hackers: “Hacker Rates 12 Hacking Scenes In Movies and TV | How Real Is It? – YouTube”. Write a Journal Entry about how you think the media influences our understanding about cybersecurity.

The media influences a lot of the general public’s view of cybersecurity. It is often seen that the media has a dramatic impact on our lives and that we get a lot of misinformation from these different types of sources such as movies, news, social media, and other entertainment platforms. In the YouTube video, Keren Elazari, an internationally recognized security analyst, describes twelve different hacking scenes in movies and rates them based on realism. In one of the hacking scenes, it depicts a capture the flag competition where there is a lot of people attending and trying to compete. One of the characters needs help and someone comes and glances over his shoulder and immediately knows what to do. In most instances, this is very unrealistic and people don’t have the ability to “hack in seconds.” This misconception is depicted in a lot of movies where they will have a character who can do a task in seconds or even minutes, but in real life, it would take closer to an hour to go through the code, sometimes even longer. Another example that she talks about is that a lot of movies will have scenes where the digital forensics employees will open up a device in the middle of the agency office. In real life, this does not happen. A digital forensic analyst will always open up a device that is being examined in a lab environment and make sure that they are well protected so nothing bad occurs. The movie in the YouTube video literally opens it up in the middle of the office with no precaution and it looks like all these fancy patterns and numbers. When Keren takes a closer look, none of these patterns or numbers actually correlate to anything and are just for the aesthetic of the movie. Looking at just these two movies, you can get a sense that the media shapes regular people’s ideas about how cybersecurity and cybercrime exist. More times than not, media will dramatize what actually occurs and changes a lot of these practices to suit it better for the TV screen.