Top 5 Ridiculous Hacking Scenes in Movies | Hacker News Reader

Top 5 Ridiculous Hacking Scenes in Movies

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9 pointsFSecurePal24 comments

WarGames is far from having the most ridiculous hacking scenes. In fact, if I had to write a list of technically accurate movies I would have it on my list. It showed:

1) War Dialing - Dialing phone number sequentially in order to find machines that you could connect to.

2) Redbox-esque recording of tones from the locked door and playing them back to open the door.

3) Shorting out the coin mechanism of a payphone in order to make a free phone call.

4) Attempting to login with common system accounts and brute-forcing passwords.

It was obvious to me that someone involved with the movie was pretty familiar with phone phreaking and computer hacking techniques.

The system from Jurassic park actually exists. It's the 3D File System Navigator made by SGI for IRIX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

Yes. Plus, the girl was happy to see a Unix prompt. What's not to like?

Transformers. "Maybe it's a precaution, because isn't that what we're doing? The signal pattern is learning, it's EVOLVING on its own, and you need to move past Fourier transforms and start thinking quantum mechanics..."

I'm sure jockeys make fun of ridiculous horse racing scenes too. Real life is boring.

Probably, me and my training partners made fun of the recent movies riding the MMA hype train, but: horse racing scenes still have a jockey riding a horse around a track competing against other jockeys on horses. But tigers don't leap onto the track. The bad fighting movies still have guys hitting each other, even if their techniques are terrible, they never show any bruises and take a half dozen shots to the chin and barely wince. But the fighters don't literally fly at each other or perform super-human acts of strength. (Unless, of course, it is a fantasy movie.)

Hacking in most movies is basically magic. Yes, there are people in front of computers, but the visualizations and narrations of what's going on bear so little resemblance to reality that they might as well be invoking magic missile.

It's really just a difference of scale, not kind: the details of technology in general and hacking in particular are so foreign to most people that they're willing to accept much wider aberrations than in other areas.

Have you watched Flashpoint? It's a HK action film from 07, one of the earlier films to incorporate MMA.

It's still kinda laughable, but people (except for the last fight...) seem to take realistic amounts of damage and bruising. As a wrestler, I cheered when I saw someone actually sprawl (well,try to sprawl) on a shot. And then facepalmed when I saw a double leg to suplex...

I'm sure MMA fighters will do the same. Cheer in some parts, and then facepalm so hard in others. At least the facepalming parts looked really cool. And no flying armbars from what I remember.

haha, right, like Rocky is an accurate depiction of boxing

Independence Day is not that ridiculous of a hacking scene, as apparently there was a deleted scene that explained that all of our computing technology came from the alien spaceship that crash-landed.

It still makes it incredibly unlikely, but not as ridiculous.

Oh come on, it's just as ridiculous.

We have three big flavours of OS right here and now, and virii between them are nigh-incompatable. The idea that they could write a virus on a Mac and have it Just Work on whatever alien OS they're running is laughable.

Hell, if the aliens were running Windows or Linux, even, that movie would have been over in a heartbeat.

This reminds me of Eddie Izzard's encore on computers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C_HjWr3Nk

A few rebuttals, though... The Jurassic Park scene was genuinely Unix... the screen was showing FileSystem Navigator, a 3D... uhh... File system navigator... on SGI Irix, an operating system that counts as Unix in my book.

WarGames simplified a lot of hacks the same way MacGyver simplified a lot of real-world tricks. To show the technically correct processes could take hours and would be boring. Some of the stuff in Swordfish was similar. Theoretically possible but technical details glossed over. And some glaring technical flaws beyond the "hacking" scenes.

Real [malicious computer hacking | video editing | race car driving | etc... ] looks really boring to people that don't know what they're looking at.

There are so many bad-but-funny scenes missing from this list. Most notably:

  1. Hackers (1995)
  2. The Net (1995)
  3. Terminator II

The only hacking scene I can remember that is more realistic than simply bashing on some keys while improbable windows filled with illegible code or fancy 3D worlds whizz by is in The Matrix.

It was simple, but I liked that they used and mentioned things like perl and emacs in The Social Network.

Sneakers.

the actual "scene" is line feed barf turning into a picture of air traffic, which is basically nonsense. but the logic behind it: a just discovered crypto attack (complete with lots of linear algebra even) hardwired into a device allowing them to read/crack anything based on current gen crypto is about as close as I've ever seen to a correct computer macguffin in film (hell in fiction).

Yeah, +1 for Sneakers; should definitely have made it on my list of honorable mentions.

Well give the Matrix (Reloaded) some credit, in the scene with trinity hacking the power grid, she used nmap to attack a known ssh exploit: http://nmap.org/movies.html

isn't that what I do? :)

My favourite ridiculous scene was from Firewall, when Harrison Ford uses his daughter's iPod to hack into a mainframe.

It's not a movie but the show 24 was always the worst...in less then 1 hour, real time mind you, they would decrypt insanely complicated stuff...but alas I still loved the action on that show

Not to mention always having a signal on their phones.

How does Hackers not even make the list?

It's a while since I've seen it, but if I remember correctly Takedown (about Kevin Mitnick) wasn't too bad when it came to the hacking scenes.

On a related note, I recently watched The Social Network and was surprised by how tolerable the technical dialog was.

Ridiculous, but inspiring :)

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