11 ms·

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD a

by bane 11y ago

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment and characters as places and people who could have come from this world. The sort of irreverent, authority denouncing, cybervandalism spoke to me. The Warez, Demoscen, ANSI art scenes all seemed to sort of be a kind of foundation that created a universe that this movie made manifest. When this movie came out, I was still telneting, BBSing and gophering around "cyberspace". As soon as I found a writeable folder on an ftp server I'd make hidden folders and upload crap and tell all my friends. We'd stay up late wardialing and playing this soundtrack. We'd telnet to random IP addresses and then get excited when we'd hit a VAX system, just like in the movie. It formed a kind of social scaffolding my nerd friends and I hung our digital world off of. It's kind of laughable in many ways now, like many teen counter culture movement. But it still holds a special place in my heart.

wainstead 11y ago
"Three Days of the Condor" used to make the list too, because it was alleged to be one of Mitnick's favorite movies.
fein 11y ago
Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.
- wj 11y ago
  If you haven't seen it you might enjoy Algorithm which you can watch free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Antitrust is pretty good at what it aims to be: "idealistic hacker meets corporate environment". They even explicitly mention "Open Source", once.
- DCoder 11y ago
  Antitrust's "I think my girlfriend is trying to poison my food, so I'll cut myself, expose the cut to that food and see if I get sick" scene ruined the movie for me. I know that's basically how allergy testing works, but it was still cringe-worthy.
- txrit 11y ago
  Antitrust was great, a longtime favourite of mine. They at least had some focus on coding etc. rather than just mindless bashing on a keyboard to "hack" random systems.
caseysoftware 11y ago
Hackers was one of the first movies I bought on DVD. I still have it around here somewhere..
gdubs 11y ago
The Manhattan Project is pretty great too -- similar era and vibe to War Games. More of a social engineering hack than a computer hack, but still...
JoshTriplett 11y ago
The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome music to accompany it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFAGE4rs71M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFAGE4rs71M It's not exactly a sophisticated effort (using a wardialer and guessing a backdoor password), but it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes. Sneakers, by contrast, has some interesting depictions of social engineering, as well as the amusingly low-tech yet effective approach of "point a camera at someone's hands while they type a password" (which remains a realistic danger today). Hackers is dripping in 80s cheese, but that was what made it fun. And it captures how people thought hacking worked and what kinds of things people thought it could do: type something into a computer and take over a city's streetlights.
- cxseven 11y ago
  There's a retrospective on WarGames that's even better than the CS Monitor Hackers article at http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-08/ff_wargames?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16... WarGames was another case of life imitating art imitating life, when the over-the-top NORAD command center set (the director called it "NORAD's wet dream of itself") became the blueprint for command centers everywhere going nuts with monitors. A NORAD commander is quoted there: "A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, 'Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?' It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, 'If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?'"
- nailer 11y ago
  > it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes. In Ex Machina the main character appears writes a field sieve in Python to break some crypto. The code doesn't actually do that but it's still decent. A bunch of older movies featured nmap.
qznc 11y ago
What about Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/ Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/ Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/
- bane 11y ago
  Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie. The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself. Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!
- daodedickinson 11y ago
  blackhat had some problems (when Helmsworth apes the "you son of a bitch!" scene from Manhunter I groaned in pain) but overall is, if only for the type of person that might browse this site, worth watching.

by bane 11y ago

wainstead 11y ago

"Three Days of the Condor" used to make the list too, because it was alleged to be one of Mitnick's favorite movies.

fein 11y ago

Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.

wj 11y ago
If you haven't seen it you might enjoy Algorithm which you can watch free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc
JoshTriplett 11y ago
Antitrust is pretty good at what it aims to be: "idealistic hacker meets corporate environment". They even explicitly mention "Open Source", once.
DCoder 11y ago
Antitrust's "I think my girlfriend is trying to poison my food, so I'll cut myself, expose the cut to that food and see if I get sick" scene ruined the movie for me. I know that's basically how allergy testing works, but it was still cringe-worthy.
txrit 11y ago
Antitrust was great, a longtime favourite of mine. They at least had some focus on coding etc. rather than just mindless bashing on a keyboard to "hack" random systems.

caseysoftware 11y ago

Hackers was one of the first movies I bought on DVD. I still have it around here somewhere..

gdubs 11y ago

The Manhattan Project is pretty great too -- similar era and vibe to War Games. More of a social engineering hack than a computer hack, but still...

JoshTriplett 11y ago

The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome music to accompany it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFAGE4rs71M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFAGE4rs71M It's not exactly a sophisticated effort (using a wardialer and guessing a backdoor password), but it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes. Sneakers, by contrast, has some interesting depictions of social engineering, as well as the amusingly low-tech yet effective approach of "point a camera at someone's hands while they type a password" (which remains a realistic danger today). Hackers is dripping in 80s cheese, but that was what made it fun. And it captures how people thought hacking worked and what kinds of things people thought it could do: type something into a computer and take over a city's streetlights.

cxseven 11y ago
There's a retrospective on WarGames that's even better than the CS Monitor Hackers article at http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-08/ff_wargames?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16... WarGames was another case of life imitating art imitating life, when the over-the-top NORAD command center set (the director called it "NORAD's wet dream of itself") became the blueprint for command centers everywhere going nuts with monitors. A NORAD commander is quoted there: "A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, 'Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?' It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, 'If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?'"
nailer 11y ago
> it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes. In Ex Machina the main character appears writes a field sieve in Python to break some crypto. The code doesn't actually do that but it's still decent. A bunch of older movies featured nmap.

qznc 11y ago

What about Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/ Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/ Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/

bane 11y ago
Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie. The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself. Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!
daodedickinson 11y ago
blackhat had some problems (when Helmsworth apes the "you son of a bitch!" scene from Manhunter I groaned in pain) but overall is, if only for the type of person that might browse this site, worth watching.