Antitrust

“This business is binary, you’re either a one or a zero, alive or dead.”

It’s time for a role reversal: this time it’s the corporation (NURV), which the movie seems to give slight hints at being Microsoft,  doing the hacking. ‘Antitrust’ actually garners some credibility in being one of the few movies that actually shows something you’d see on a real computer screen.  NURV’s maliciousness comes from secretly recording footage of various programmers from around the world. The footage is then scanned to copy whatever code was on the programmers’ monitors. You would think if a company had software so sophisticated that it could automatically detect changes in someone else’s code via video feed that they wouldn’t need to steal other people’s work.

Sneakers

Everybody and their mother was in this underrated film:  Robert Redford, James Earle Jones, Ben Kingsley, Dan Akroyd and even the late River Phoenix. The film centers around two hacker friends who go their separate ways. One forms an “ethical hacking” group of security specialists, led by Redford, that are hired to break into people’s homes to ensure nobody can break into their places. Everything is peachy until the NSA hires them to retrieve a black box that can crack any code. The other friend, played by Kingsley, decides he wants to use this black box to crash the world economy.

Tron

Boy makes software, boy gets software stolen, boy gets digitized into a computer trying to get software back. Cult classic ‘Tron’ was the first movie to show that hacking didn’t need to be all done outside the computer. To this day I still feel bad uninstalling programs after seeing them race each other in the cut throat Light Cycle arena. A sequel, titled Tron 2.0, was announced last year at Comic-Con and is due out in 2011.

Transformers

While the movie centers around giant robots beating the living hell out of each other, it does also feature the hottest hacker I’ve ever seen on screen (next to Anjelina Jolie) who is also coupled with one of the most jarring Australian accents. In the movie she finds it difficult to crack the code left by a species far more advanced than us, so she takes it to her “advisor” Glen who of course deciphers the foreign signal in seconds.

Independence Day

Speaking of hacking alien signals, we’ve come across one of the, if not the,  most ridiculous hacking offenders on this list. If it’s not enough that hackers are able to effortlessly crack into or take down government networks, then take a seat because Jeff Goldblum’s character in ‘Independence Day’ wrote a virus for an alien computer system. That’s right. An alien civilization that has mastered interstellar travel has had their security network penetrated by an Earthling running on a Mac. The bypassing of alien security takes seconds and not only does he deliver the virus but he adds in a nice little GIF animation of a skull and crossbones.

Swordfish

This may be the movie that contains the most entertaining hacking on this list, even better than ‘Mission Impossible’. First off we have the ruggedly good looking Hugh Jackman cast as one of the world’s greatest hackers. If that alone didn’t break your suspension of disbelief then certainly the multitude of hacking scenes did. My personal favorites include Hugh getting a blowjob while cracking the 128-bit encrypted DoD database with gun to his head, as well as dancing around while creating his “worm”. Words can’t do these clips justice, you just have to see them.

The Matrix

Almost every computer geek’s fantasy came to life when ‘The Matrix’ hit screens in early 1999. Featuring Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson, a lolely software developer by day and notorious hacker “Neo” by night, discovering there’s more to the world than meets the eye. The movie features some of the most righteous hacks and bad assery ever put down on film. From Morpheus and his crew remotely hack into a machine driven computer simulation while trying to avoid ambush to Neo dodging (and then not dodging) bullets to the thought provoking philosophies on what is and is not real. Unfortunately the movie also stimulated some not so positive things including two lack luster sequels and every online gamer feeling the need to change their username to “Neo“.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

The 1999 made-for-telvision drama details the ascention and rivalry of industry titans Apple and Microsoft. Featuring Noah Wyle portraying a quick to anger and demeaning Steve Jobs along with a Anthony Michael Hall as the deceptive and manipulative Bill Gates. While there isn’t much hacking in terms of breaking into someone else’s system to steal data, there is lots of backstabbing and thievery in order to obtain software intelligence.

Takedown (aka Track Down)

Kevin Mitnick, portrayed by Skeet Ulrich, is a hacker driven by a curiosity that gets him into all sorts of trouble. Based on the book written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura, ‘Takedown’ follows Mitnick as he stumbles upon some seriously powerful software developed by Shimomura. While Mitnick is quickly trying to discover what the software is capable of, Shimomura desperately tries to track him down before Mitnick realizes what he’s in possession of. The film features some of the most realistic hacking I’ve seen on screen. Rather than flying equations and software that can crack even the most impregnable security, ‘Takedown’ actually shows the characters using real operating systems and speaking in specific computer terminology that doesn’t sound completely fabricated.

In his book The Art of Intrusion, the real Mitnick states that both the book and movie are “extremely inaccurate”. Mitnick claims that his intentions were never malicious, with never having stolen or damaged anyone’s data, he just copied some software out of curiosity.

Johnny Mnemonic

Released the same year as ‘Hackers’, the movie follows data trafficker Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) who has turned himself into a walking flash drive with an implant in his brain that allows him to securely store information too sensitive to transmit otherwise. The implant allows him to carry a whopping 80 GB of storage or 160 GB if he uses a “doubler”. On one specific run, Johnny takes a package containing highly sensitive material causing him to be the target for a variety of head hunters. If that wasn’t bad enough, the package exceeds the implant’s safety limits and will kill him if he doesn’t remove it in time. The movie is rife with Keanu one-liners and offers us a glimpse of what we can expect from the internet of the future. Apparently the future we regress back to dial-up, use virtual reality to navigate and hacking consists of child-like puzzles that will shock us if we don’t solve them correctly.

Jurassic Park

Indeed dinosaurs have nothing to do with hacking, unless Newman is writing the software for your dinosaur park. While the movie never shows anybody hacking into a system, it does show the futility of Samuel L. Jackson trying to use his fellow employee’s computer followed up with his extreme disdain for that “hacker crap”. Interestingly enough in the clip below the words he’s saying don’t match what he’s typing on screen.

Untraceable

Jennifer Marsh is a single mom who works in the FBI’s cybercrime division. One night she gets an anonymous tip regarding a site called killwithme.com that shows someone getting killed at a rate directly proportional to the amount of visitors the website is bringing in. The killer’s motive is to show that the public loves watching people suffer. This same killer is also an adept hacker as he can perform a variety of complex tasks such as making the website’s server “untraceable” and breaking into the computer of Marsh’s SUV. Couldn’t we have avoided this whole situation and had the ISPs block access to the site?

-Frank

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Tags: Hacking