Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? It is time for another tech Stuff classic and we actually have a part two.
So last week, last Friday.
We had The Worst Hacking Scenes from Hollywood Part one with Shannon Morse, and Shannon is back for this other classic episode, The Worst Hacking Scenes from Hollywood Part two. It originally published on September fourteenth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Today we're going to talk more about some of the embarrassing examples out there in entertainment as well as some of the really good ones.
And we're going to.
Start off with a conversation about a pair of movies that not only did a disservice to hackers, but also virtual reality.
We joined the conver station already in progress.
Lawnmower Man and lawnmower Man Too, inspired by the work of Stephen King. So these movies are terrible, it could be a lot of fun to watch with a group of people who just want to see, like a really bad movie and make fun of it, you know. Mst three K style. I included a couple of eclips and I showed them to Shannon. One of them was a demonstration that hacking a system in this world isn't just
graphical but immersive. So you're wearing like a head mounted display, and you're wearing gloves that allow you to interact with the virtual world.
And so they're.
Showing a character getting backdoor access to a system by slapping at hexagons inside the virtual space. So these hexagons are popping up in front of them, and he's slapping at them and eventually gets you know, access granted. Mostly it's getting access denied, but eventually access granted pops up and it looks like the only thing that he did differently was just that he hit it a little faster
that time. So, in other words, it'd be equivalent to that NCIS scene we talked about earlier, where if you just tiede fast enough, you either hack in or you prevent a hack from happening. Obviously, this is not at all remotely realistic, but it is one of those where you look at and you you could tell the screenwriter was saying, well, I want to show that this character who has has found that he's very powerful in the virtual space, can access a system.
How can I do that in a way that's not just.
You know, it's over in a blink of an eye, and there's no way to show it visually, So they created this sort of three D display. This isn't one of those things we see in a lot of Hollywood movies where they try and visualize the navigating a secure system as like going through a maze.
It happens a ton.
And again, actually going through that maze of information that's located on a network is actually quite boring looking on camera. So they created this out by terrible virtual reality scene to actually give some kind of implementation, some kind of visual implementation to the people that are watching this movie. And it's pretty terrible. It's definitely not how gaining access to a network would work, but I thought it was hilarious. Yeah.
Lawnmower Man two also has a scene that's similar to that. The characters are looking at what is just an equation on a computer screen. So they're looking at this equation and trying to figure out how to get access and one of the character says that she can't get past the memory lock to access the chain so the smarmy computer expert who's next to her says, well, all you have to do is just enhance the memory index, which
already none of that makes any real sense. It's kind of like Star Trek technobabble where they talk about reversing the polarity it really, it's just there to say something technical is happening.
And you don't need to understand what it is. It's kind of shorthand.
Yeah.
So then a little yellow ball appears on the screen and the equation they're looking at it starts to rotate and starts to turn on its side and become a three dimensional maze again, so we get another example of accessing a system involves navigating through an actual three dimensional maze. He uses gesture controls to move this little yellow ball around until finally getting to where the data is. The
whole time he's just using meaningless computer jargon incorrectly. And then the very the cherry on top of the Sunday is that he says to da, so uh, if you really want a good time, watch the hacking scene from lawnmower Man too. Both of those, obviously, are are in that same category of trying to visualize what this process would be like in a way that is interesting. I said that the worst a movie can do is not only be incorrect, but also fail to be entertaining, and then I would.
Argue both of these fall into that category.
I feel like if hacking was as entertaining as it is in lawnmower Man, I would have gotten into it at a much, much younger age.
It's I remember lawnmower Man's one of them movies.
I would often cite as being a real reason why virtual reality died in the mid nineties.
So sad, yeah.
Because the stuff that was around in the mid nineties was very, very primitive, right. You had like Dactyl Nightmare, these games that were just polygons, and they were very primitive. The gameplay was limited, the headsets you wore had to be supported on cables because they were so heavy they
would really hurt your neck otherwise. And so when people saw what the actual state of the art of virtual reality was at the time compared to what they were seeing in films, that gap ended up making people say, well, this isn't good at all. I don't see any reason in putting any money toward this, and virtual reality died for about ten years, and now we're starting to see it get back into the consumer space with the success of Oculus Rift in HTCVI mean you can get your
hands on one. We're starting to see it come back, but it took almost twenty years for it to recover. So thanks lawnmower Man. Not only were you a bad movie, but you killed v Are.
It's all your fault.
Yeah, I'm not bitter or anything.
There's a movie that we have to mention everyone that I when I posted on Twitter that I was going to do this, I had a lot of people say the entire movie of Hackers should be considered as part of this as a bad hacking scene.
And Hackers is a great example.
It's another one of those where it's a movie that was posing as an anti authoritarian kind of film, but in the safest way possible, like there was nothing.
Really daring about it.
And the opening sequence has a couple of characters trying to battle it out over one another, and one of them is it trying to create an intrusion into a system. The other one exit and then shuts everything down. So Shannon, typically when you're talking about things like a hacker intruding into a system, detecting that there's been an intrusion. We're not normally seeing this happen on a one versus one kind of basis in real time typically are we.
Not necessarily a lot of times, what you'll see with a hack intrusion into a system, like you said, is that they will sit and watch and they will do a lot of recons so they'll try to figure out what's available for them, what can they see, and they'll wait for something to happen that'll give them even more access.
And then if you have somebody that's working inside of that company that's being intruded upon, usually the first action that you will see is them trying to also collect information so they can find where this opening is, where this vulnerability is, and then they'll shut it down.
And then after that they'll do.
A whole whole research report on it and try to figure out like who actually did it, and probably take two enforcement agencies so that they can get the capture of the person and hopefully get them charged, because that's not a very good thing to do. Yeah, I mean, you don't necessarily see people like duking it out like they do in package.
Yeah, it's usually you know, like, your first indication that something is wrong can often just be that you notice there's unusual amounts of data traffic across your network, and you might say, well, why why are we getting these spikes. If you're a savvy hacker, you're trying to mask your activity. You're kind of like trying to sneak in when a big crowd is going into a room. It's kind of the same thing, right, Like you're waiting for large transfers of data so that it masks what you are doing.
In a lot of cases, if you're really really good at what you're doing, you're trying to kind of go in that route because it means you can stay hidden for longer and get more information.
Information is valuable.
Therefore, you don't want to just you know, you don't want to just break into a system and then immediately get booted out.
Then what was the point of that other than to say.
Hey, I figured out you have a vulnerability, And if that's your job, that's awesome. If you're a white hat hacker and your job is to hey, we've got this system, we think it's pretty secure, but we would like you to really put it to the test, and if you find any vulnerabilities, let us know, and then we can go and we can address that and fix them so that the bad guys don't have a chance to do it later.
That's a legitimate job. But in the movies, that's not what you see.
You see a person going like I've got access, and then almost immediately everything is gone pear shaped, right, like there's alarms going off, And that's just not how it works, not if you're doing it correctly anyway, exactly. Yeah, So these movies, I mean, I appreciate it. Again, try to create dramatic tension, but not terribly accurate.
One thing that I did like about hackers is the fact that he uses social engineering to first gain access to this network, which is something that's very very common with hackers in general, because humans are the first, the first.
Failure in any network.
They're the people, they're the ones that you can generally go to and find some kind of vulnerability because people inherently trust each other. And that's just a thing that humans need to understand is if somebody is asking you questions that you shouldn't necessarily give out, don't give them out because they might be social engineering you into giving out those answers. Hackers also does a good job of
pinpointing people towards real life hacker culture. For example, there is one scene in Hackers where they read off the Hacker Manifesto, which was originally found in a hacker magazine, which you can only find if you were a part of that culture. And then later on in the movie they also show a real life booklet, a documentation book that shows that was actually used by phone operations to you know, put up new towers and things like that
back in the nineteen eighties and nineties. So it has these real life parts of culture, but in reality the movie still has that terrible Hollywood hacking parts of it as well.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the social engineering. I'm actually going to do an episode about specifically about social engineering live at Dragon Con with our mutual friend Brian Brushwood. So Brushwood's going to come on the show. There's no one like a magician to tell you how to fool people right, how to lie to.
People and get them to do the things you want them to do.
So we're gonna we're going to go into social engineering big time on that episode. And I'm also glad you mentioned that things like the manuals that definitely is a big part of hacker culture, going all the way back to those phone freak days, where again the hackers were not necessarily trying to take advantage of a system. They just wanted to know how it worked. They were fascinated by the way it actually performed, and so when you got a manual, suddenly you had an insight into it.
Even if the manual didn't go into deep detail about how the system as a whole operates on the back end, it could give you enough insight and then they start understanding like, oh wow, that's really cool that they have this system set up in such a way where they can route calls like this and they can dynamically change things over. And I'm glad you brought that up, because once again, being a hacker doesn't necessarily mean you're a
terrible person at all. It may mean that you just have a deep curiosity that is only satisfied by learning how this stuff works. And it's not always easy to do that. Information is not always publicly available at all times. There have been times where it accidentally got publicly available.
That's again going.
Back to the phone freaks, there were some phone manuals that kind of were released to the public, not intentionally. It also wasn't considered to be a huge problem until the phone freakers got hold of it and suddenly you had all these people making weird calls long distance all over the place.
So funny.
Yeah, our next one is another case of people just throwing out terms without really having any meaning to them. I mean, the terms themselves have meaning, but not in the context of the lines. And it was from a CSI New York episode in which a character says, and this is a quote, I'll create a gooey interface using visual basics, see if I can track an IP address. So, Shannon, you want to track an IP address? Do you go to the trouble of developing a graphical user interface?
No, what I would do is open up probably netcat in my terminals so that I can gain access and see what the heck's going on on that IP address. Yeah, Or if it was wireless and I was on a nearby network, I would I would probably use wireshark and WiFi Pinapple Like. It's not you don't have to create an entirely new graphical user interface table to be able to access an IP address and see what kind of traffic is happening to and from them.
Yeah, it doesn't.
Creating a graphical user interface literally makes no sense. I mean, it has nothing to do with your ability to track an IP address, to identify an IP address. It has nothing to do with a graphical user interface is an interface in itself. Isn't a thing that performs these functions. It's just a way to visualize data and allow you to interact with it in some way. So Windows is
a graphical user interface. It's a gooey. Any any program that has a graphical representation of information that allows you to move things around, that's a guy. Has nothing to do with the actual function. It is separate from the function. It is just a way of manifesting what that data actually means. Now, you might go through the trouble of creating some sort of visual data if you wanted to explain it to someone else who wouldn't understand if you
just handed them lines of code or whatever. But that's not what That doesn't even work in this case because we're talking about an IP address. We're an IP address. You don't need like a pie chart or you know, you don't need a graphical representation of what an IP address is.
It's an IP address exactly.
Yeah, this one, this one kind of broke my brain for about twenty minutes when I when I watched it. We'll be back with more terrible hacking scenes from Hollywood after this quick break. The next one I had on the list was another example of hackers battling it out in real time and seeing who could type the fastest.
This happens all the time.
There was also an episode of Chuck that did this where the best part of that episode of Chuck was that the guy that Chuck was facing against was played by Freddy Wong and his character was named Freddie. So I was like, oh my gosh, it's Freddy Wong, a YouTube star.
Done good.
Yeah, it's fantastic, It's I think it's it's I can't remember. It's like Chuck versus the Hackathon or something like that. It's along those lines, and Freddy Wong plays the elite hacker that he goes up against. But in this case, I'm talking about criminal minds, which, as Nicholas Brendan in It, who I will always and forever think of as Xander from Buffy the vampire slayer.
Yep.
And he's brought in to try and access another i think another employees system, but the employees kind of on the lamb and she's working with other folks who are trying to do this quietly without the rest of the organization taking any notice of them. And so he ends up getting into her system and trying to snoop around a bit. She notices, and then they have this duel.
And as Shannon has already said, this is not really how we see things play out, but it does have the best line I think out of all the examples we have here, which is her gooey is mind blowing.
And what you would actually see a hacker say is, well, check out this code.
Yeah yeah, instead of all these little uh these little windows pop up. Also, it's funny because in the sequence as they're typing uh, there's like one point where the Xander I'll always call him Xander, is saying, well, here, see what you think about this, And all that you see on the screen is that one of the windows on the screen is dragged down to like the lower right corner.
Yes, and you're the wow, you have a.
Mouse so bad, But they're actually not even using computer mice, they're just typing on the keyboard and so so really all you're seeing are all these little windows being dragged around the screen and no real way of doing that easily. If you're just if you're using a keyboard, you're making it too hard on yourself, honestly.
One thing is about hackers that I have noticed. I am not as good as a lot of my friends are, but keyboard shortcuts are huge in the hacker culture.
Huge.
Well yeah, I mean, especially if you're doing the same sort of code over and over, if you're going to be using the same sort of strings repeatedly, having like various shortcuts and macro set up saves you so much time. It's way more efficient. And you know, I totally get that. I've worked on documents where that sort of thing made a lot of sense. And I don't even do coding right I'm doing I'm talking about working mostly in the
legal world. I don't like to talk about it. It was a long time ago, and I really like to leave that chapter behind. I was working four lawyers. I wasn't being pursued by them. Another great example weird science. This one sort of gets a pass from me too.
Because it's such a goofy movie. It's one of those films from the eighties where you kind of the basic premise is kind of squiky, well more than kind of squiky, because you've got two high school males who decide to try and create a girl so that they can do various sexual things with her, which is pretty awful. But it turns out that she ends up having a way more intelligence than either of them and a lot more agency than either of them. So it's okay because it
could have gone way worse than that. I know, because I've watched a movie recently that took the other path and it was terrible. I was for a different podcast, So this one also has another depiction of characters trying to navigate through a three dimensional virtual environment in order
to access a secure system. In this case, they're trying to create a simulated brain for their created female, but the computer that Wyatt has is only capable of getting her intelligence up to fifth grade level, and they need more than that, so they tap into some as far as I can tell, unidentified government agency to get more computing power, which in this film is equated to electricity.
I guess because if you watch the sequence when they get access to the computers, everything at the government center is going crazy. You're seeing these real to real tapes that are spinning super fast. You see lights flashing, and then a power surge ends up blasting all of the electronics at Wyatt's home, like the microwave, and there's like
a smoke detector. I think that explodes, and so that's what zooms in enough power to not only boost the intelligence of the character up to superhuman levels, but also somehow magically brings to life this woman. I'd say ninety seven percent accurate. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Are you hiring?
Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Posting your job in one place isn't enough to find quality candidates. If you want to find the perfect hire, you need to post your job on all the top job sites, and now you can. With ZipRecruiter dot com. You could post your job to one hundred plus job sites, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, all with a single click find candidates in any city or industry nationwide. Just post once and watch
your qualified candidates roll in to zip recruiters. Easy to use interface. There's no juggling emails or calls to your office. You can quickly screen candidates, rate them, and hire the right person fast. Find out today why zip recruiter has been used by over one million businesses and right now listeners of tech stuff can post jobs on zip recruiter for free by going to ZipRecruiter dot com slash first. That's ZipRecruiter dot com slash first. F I R S
T one more time. Try it for free. Go to ZipRecruiter dot com slash first.
Oh, so this is a great example the Weird Science series. Her segment is a great example of what you can actually do with more computing power. So in the real life, we have quantum computing, which people are currently working on to be able to decrypt encryption that is not currently vulnerable, but that requires more computing power. That's what quantum computing is all about, not necessarily more electricity.
Right, Yeah, quantum computing, you know, using cubits where you have quantum bits that represent not just a zero, not just a one, but both and technically all values in between mean that you can complete calculations in parallel. And this is great for certain types of computing problems. Where you can have those parallel computing problems that are easily solved this way, other computing problems are not parallel, and in those cases, a quantum computer is not necessarily going
to be any better than a classical computer. In fact, it may be worse depending upon how many cubits the quantum computer has.
If it has enough, then it'll chug along.
But for those parallel problems, including encryption, quantum computers will transform our world. The encryption that we rely upon today will be trivial if you have a significantly powerful quantum computer, because it will be able to go through all the possible answers that are the basis for your encryption. Typically we're talking about very large hash numbers and assign probabilities to them and figure out things like your encryption keys
very very quickly. So that is interesting, But as you say, not just by It's not something that's done by pumping more electricity through a power line exactly. That would be a little little simplistic. Our next example is of course the most famous one in my mind. It's the one that I spent an episode ranting about previously on tex stuff. So I won't go into too much detail. It is
Independence Day. It's like Kickbook movie. Yeah, I gotta tell you, if an alien race ever attacks us, I want Jeff Goldbloom to develop the computer virus that we're going to put on their on their ships so that they can't attack us.
So this is a great example because he was was out of any prior knowledge, he was able to get a computer virus from his Mac laptop onto an alien spacecraft and be able to basically take them over and.
Shut them down.
Yeah, so there's so many things wrong with this one. We cannot be certain that any alien, intelligent alien civilization out there uses computers that remotely resemble the way our computers work. That's problem one. Problem two, we can't be certain that a virus that we would create for Earth based computers would ever be transferable onto an alien craft.
Problem three, we don't even know how.
We would do that, right, Like, it's do they have universal serial ports or something? What's how do you get your stuff, your your program into alien technology, even if it's wireless, the wireless protocols, those are things. We don't just have computers shooting off random radio waves. They have to follow very specific rules for computers to communicate with each other.
Everything about this is wrong.
And given the premise of this movie, I highly doubt that their alien technology would even remotely compare to ours.
I'm sure that they would be.
Much much stronger and much more, much more advanced than our own.
Yeah, and some of the arguments are that, oh, but see, the whole point of the movie is that the United States took technology from the Aliens and use that to boost our own technology so that we would advance faster. And my thought to that is how that considering that all the technology that we rely upon today is based off of very very very well documented advances in engineering, none of which are so dramatic as to say, oh, that's when the Aliens arrived.
This is so great. I love that one.
Now.
I included this next one just for you, Shannon, because I know that you are a lover of Japanese culture, and so I found a great anime scene from tangin Tapa gurin Lagan gurn Hen and it involves a character going into a virtual world as a virtual avatar.
Runs through a maze as we've.
Seen before, finds a lock box that apparently has the data he wants to get At takes out a green glowing key, puts it in the lock box, tries to unlock. It doesn't work, so as he do, his virtual avatar head butts the box repeatedly till it breaks open.
He grabs hold of a red sphere, which.
Represents the data he wants, and then his character eats the data and that's how they analyze it.
And boy do I wish that's the way it worked.
Oh that's hilarious. I just I hope that it tasted good.
Yeah, I mean, I mean it is a virtual character, so I guess you could technically assume it tastes any way you like it to taste. I watched this and I thought, well, this is delightful, but it's it's also again not trying to play this as this is how real hackers are. This is obviously a fantasy sci fi world that we're looking at, but one of the most entertaining versions of that meme that I've ever seen.
I just love it, and like, just watching that scene makes me want to watch the entire.
Anime because it's just so ridiculous.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like somebody trying.
To brute force, but their implementation of brute forcing is headbutts.
Yeah, literal brute force, like not not putting password after password attempt through a password manager, nothing like that. It's literally attacking a virtual box with a virtual headbutt. It's wonderful. The last little bit I have on here, this one. This one doesn't really count because it was done on purpose.
But there was a segment on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert who had Michael Ian Black on Michael Ian Black who was in the state and tons of other stuff, and Michael Ian Black explained that he had dramatic acting chops that he felt he never got a chance to really exercise. He's known as a comedic actor, and that he always wanted his dream role is that of a hacker on a police procedural show, because it meant that he could dress in nice clothes, sit down behind a desk,
and everything he would do would seem really important. He says, it's a dream job. And so then they do a segment where Stephen Colbert's show gets hacked and Michael Ian Black comes back out to fight off against the hack. It is a send up of all the tropes we've been mentioning so far in this episode, and if you have not seen it. I recommend going out and watching it because it's hilarious.
My favorite part is the fact that he comes out with black lipstick on and he's like biker gloves, which first off, would be incredibly hard to type in yep, wearing those gloves. And second off, like the hackers, I know, do you not wear black lipstick, especially if they're male. Yeah.
The first one of the first things he says is talking about how he's gonna be typing, and then his typing will in no way be hampered by the fact he's wearing fingerless biker gloves, so he's actually he actually brings attention to that, and there is a funny there's a funny moment he's bent over Stephen Colbert's desk and he's typing furiously, not really typing, he's just slapping at
the keyboard furiously. And then it becomes clear that his lines are on the screen and he scrolled past them, and so he's like, I'm trying to find my line. So there's the But it's great because they just roll with it, they just keep on going. So it's fantastic to see that kind of self aware take on the way hackers and hacking culture has been portrayed in the popular media. We're going to take another quick break and we'll be right back with more of the worst hacking
scenes from Hollywood. We've harped on a lot of different shows in movies about being terrible or being inaccurate, but there are some examples out there that are trying really hard to be respectful and realistic when it comes to hacker culture. One of the ones that leaps to mind is Mister Robot, a series where hacking plays a very important part. It's not like it's all about hacking, but that's an important plot device in several episodes.
And they name.
Real security firms, they name real penetration teams that actually go and do the sort of testing. They name real software packages that are meant to either help someone commit one of these attacks or defend against them.
They use real products.
They're so it's clear that people who are working on the show do their research.
Yes, it's very clear, and in fact, I have a very close working relationship with the team over at Mister Robot to make sure that they get our products right, because they have shown very recently one of hack Five's products called the USB robber Ducky.
They have a.
Team over there that includes somebody who used to work for the FBI, so they have actual people who have worked with security and with privacy and they have a general understanding, but they still like to talk to real life hackers to make sure that everything that they show on the show is legit and is an actual hack. Mister Robot is such a great example because it gives it perfect real life scenario where you have people that are fighting back.
You have people that are.
Fighting back against you know, the big corpse and trying to do something that's right for the little guy, which you do see a lot in real life hacking cases. A lot of times people will go after large corporations because they don't necessarily agree with their tactics, or they don't agree with how much they're paying their employees or
something like that. So I just I love watching Mister Robot because it gives me the chance to look at it and be like, like, oh, what they're showing right now is a real it's a real hack.
Like they're actually showing this too. A huge fan.
Base of people who wouldn't necessarily be interested in this kind of stuff unless they were watching a show. So I just love that they're bringing such a huge fan base into what we do on a day to day basis.
And I like that not only are they taking these steps to make sure that the stuff they portray is accurate, but they are even going so far as certain aspects that we do see reflected in the news. You were mentioning this shan and things like someone being on the inside of a company and for one reason or another, they decide to aid someone who wants to access that company's information, and they're doing so knowingly. It's not that
they've been tricked into it. We see this where we have their hackers who one of the best things, one of the best tools you can have is making friends with someone who works for the company that you want to try and access, like you want to get into their system. And if it's someone who's disgruntled for whatever reason, maybe they were looked over for promotion, maybe they don't like what the company is doing, maybe what the company's purpose is conflicts with their own ethical code. They might
feel like helping someone out is the right choice. And even if they themselves are not the ones doing the programming or or whatever. When it comes to it they might be the ones who allow the access in the first place. We do see that in real life, and there are sometimes where we have to ask the question like was this someone from the inside or was this someone who attacked from an external site.
Again, going back to Sony.
There's still a lot of argument about who ultimately was
responsible for that. At the time, the two big arguments that were coming out was that it was either someone in North Korea who had done this, or someone who was in the pay of North Korea, like a state agent in other words, or it was someone who used to work for Sony or was currently working for Sony and they did not like something that happened, and so as a result ended up stealing a ton of information and dumping it online for public review.
And then the.
North Korea part just became a great smoke screen for that burst. I saw that a lot of security experts, at least at the time, felt more inclined to believe it was the second possibility, that it was someone from the inside and not necessarily a state sponsored attack. I don't know if that opinion ultimately changed. I've honestly lost track of the Sony story at this point because it kind of died down after that initial flare of controversy around all the different elements. Yeah.
The interesting thing that I found about that is a lot of the friends that I have in hacker culture just move on because there are so many different hacks that you see in our day and age that they don't have time to go back and.
Discuss the Sony hack.
And disclaimer, I did do a bunch of videos for Signal by Sony, which was a different, different core company inside of Sony that was doing these shows that I was working with.
It wasn't the entertainment one that got hacked.
Yeah, but I definitely went to them when I got that job, and I was like, you sure you want to hire me because that thing happened to you guys, and I'm kind of a hacker, so.
Yeah, you heard.
Yeah, So I'm pleased that mister Robot is out there. You were mentioning before we went on on the recording, before we started recording that that Silicon Valley also typically does a pretty good job of portraying hacking in a in a realistic way.
They do so Silicon Valley. I actually hired one of my friends, Rob Fuller, who you can see in the credits of several of their episodes to give them a good overview, a good synopsis of what they should be showing on their show and what would be fake, what would be called out. So he helped, and he's actually
a penetration tester. He does this as his day job, and he's been doing it for you know, a couple of decades, I believe, so he was the perfect person for them to go to to say, you know, is this right?
Is this correct?
Can you can you actually build a script for us to show on on camera so that we don't get called out by our fan base, a lot of which is going to be the Silicon Valley, you know, gurus that actually do coding on a day day and day out basis. So Mister Robot and Siliconbat Valley both have hired on several people who have worked in security and penetration testing, information technology, things of that nature so that
they can get it right on camera. And I think that's very important because what we're finding in this in this genre, in this career career path is that.
Where there's a lot of people who lose.
Interest very very quickly in it because it is hard, it is ever changing, and it's complicated, and you have to go to school for it, and you have to get certificates that increased your knowledge, and you have to renew those certificates day in and day out every year.
So it's expensive to stay in this career too.
Hopefully you get a company or get a job with a company that you know will pay for those certificates
for you. Yeah, So the fact that they're showing these real life scenarios on camera, I'm hoping that it will increase more interest in this in this genre of work, because we really need more people to be interested in it in the long term, because it is so so important for companies as a whole, especially if they're holding user data, to be secure and to be private and to be very conscious of what they're doing behind the scenes as opposed to just making a website pretty.
The things that are most important.
To me are security and privacy, and it's it's very important to me that more and more companies get involved with this information and get a much broader understanding of how important it is to actually pay money to make sure that you have good security.
And to that end, I mean, there's a there's a movie that's coming out later on this year, I believe called I. It's got Pierce brosen in in it, uh. And in that film, there's this idea of privacy and security plays a huge part of it, as well as the Internet of Things, which again is a great illustration
of why security is so important. We have more and more devices that are are opening up opportunities to be a point of entry for a hacker, right like if you have not if you haven't designed your IoT device to also be secure and encrypted, that's a potential in depending upon how it communicates with the rest of your devices.
So this movie I that's coming out, there's a Pierce Brosnan's playing like a a Tony Stark like business guy who ends up having a an IT guy come in and help him out when he's giving a presentation and the technology is failing. The IT guy gets it turned around, and so Pierce Brosidan says, Hey, come back to my house. I'd like you to help me out with some stuff.
And the guy's like, okay, sure, and he comes by and the guy's house has got all this high tech equipment, most of which is not really working up to the.
Possibility that could.
But he also has a young like a teenage daughter that the IT guy ends up becoming fixated with. So then it becomes a psychological thriller where the IT guy who was upgrading all the systems is really using them to spy on people, and when he's rebuffed, he uses them to terrorize people. So it becomes kind of a psychological thriller slash horror movie that's IT based and Internet
of Things based. And while that is going to be pushed to the limit for drama for dramatic purposes, there's a lot there.
That you could say, like, you know, yeah.
It went to extremes for the purposes of this movie, but it does drive home certain things you should be aware of, like how many devices do you own that have microphones in them? How many do you own that have cameras in them? What are they connected to? And is it secure? Is your router secure? Did you buy any chance not change the default identifier and password to your router because you might want to do that that kind of stuff.
So I'm so grateful that I got into this early, so.
Like before Internet of Things became a thing, because now I can go home, like right at this minute, pull up a program on my computer, sit down on the same networks as my camera, and make sure that it's not open to the World Wide Web, because it's it's entirely possible that those things can happen.
They have happened, and.
It's oh, man, consumers, just I wish more consumers were interested in this kind of thing because it would make them so much safer.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's the sort of stuff no one wants to
really think about. The convenience of the technology is so great that it people don't feel feel comfortable thinking about the other side of it because the technology they rely so heavily on it it does so many useful things for them that I think that ends up making them kind of ignore the possible security problems, because if they paid attention to it, they would feel that they would either need to take a lot of effort to fix those security issues, at least the ones they can fix
from a consumer side of things, or they would have to abandon the technology, which is so incredibly useful and convenient, and neither of those.
Seem particularly interesting. It's way better to just, you know, just pretend like.
It doesn't happen and keep using your unsecured Wi Fi and yeah, absolutely.
I mean there, I've made some sacrifices in my life to be more secure. For example, I don't use Facebook Messenger on my phone, Yeah, because I don't I don't trust that feature. I don't even use the Facebook app on my phone because I don't trust the app.
Yeah.
I noticed that when I abandoned the Facebook app. You gave me a big thumbs up on that day.
Oh, yes, I did.
And there's other things that I've chosen convenience over security, even though I understand what what I might what might happen to me if I because I chose that convenience. For example, I use a thumbprint to unlock my phone, even though you are basically forced to give away a thumb print if you are ever if there is a warrant on your phone, as opposed to if you have a pin code or a password, you don't have to
give those away. So that's like those kind of things you really have to think about, especially if you know you're going into this with the with the thought you know, I have to better my security and privacy.
Yeah.
And see it's different for you too, Shannon, because you're you are aware of all the potential or at least a large majority of the potential bad things that can happen, so you can make an informed decision, and you can you can measure that risk versus the reward you get based upon whatever choice you make.
A lot of people out there they aren't.
I think the problem is so scary they don't even want to look at it, and that means that they're making uninformed, uneducated decisions. And I know the problem is scary, guys, but that's why you gotta look at it. You can't.
That's why we're here so that we can inform everybody and we can educate everyone right on the proper uses of the security and privacy.
So if you guys out there, take anything at all away from this episode, I want you to take a well, really, there's.
Two things I want you to take away.
One is, really give it some serious thought if you have it before, because it's something that could save you tons of heartache down the line, and it can protect you and those who are close to you from attacks. And the second thing I want you to remember is if aliens attack, get Jeff goldblooma mac because that guy can do anything. And that's it for that classic episode that originally published September fourteenth, twenty sixteen, The Worst Hacking
Scenes from Hollywood, Part two. Big thanks to Shannon Morse, even seven years later. She has always been a great friend and a phenomenal guest, and also is a great host all on her own. You should definitely go seek out her work. She has done tons of cool stuff and is wicked smart and experienced with things like hacking and understand that on a much deeper level than I do. So check out her stuff. It's great and I hope all of you are well, and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Zo