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from the or-is-that-what-they-want-you-to-believe? dept.
Some lighthearted news for the weekend!
The scene doesn’t include a keyboard. Or a computer mouse. But it shows why Michael Mann’s Blackhat may be the best hacker movie ever made.
For Parisa Tabriz, who sits at the center of the info-sec universe as the head of Google’s Chrome security team, it’s a Hollywood moment that rings remarkably true. “It’s not flashy, but it’s something that real criminals have tried—and highlights the fundamental security problems with foreign USB devices.”
Tabriz will also tell you that such accuracy—not to mention the subtlety of the scene with the coffee-stained papers—is unusual for a movie set in the world of information security. And she’s hardly alone in thinking so. Last week, Tabriz helped arrange an early screening of Blackhat in San Francisco for 200-odd security specialists from Google, Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Square, Cisco, and other parts of Silicon Valley’s close-knit security community, and their response to the film was shockingly, well, positive.
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/blackhat-the-best-cyber-movie/
Did you find hacking accurately depicted in the movie ?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 18 2015, @11:20AM
is that they get the hacking right.
Otherwise it comes off like one of those amateur space movies where the director obviously has no way of protraying inertial dynamics, and the movie loses all believability.
It has seemed for a long time to me to see others outside the tech community take computer integrity seriously. I sadly observe "just good enough that people don't bring it back to the store and DEMAND their money back, regardless of what was printed in the EULA" has become the order of the day. The general public seems to take presentation over substance; to me that smacks of determining the worth of a bridge as to what color it is, not the architectural design and craftsmanship to make a bridge that will last several hundred years.
Here's hoping that this movie wake up a few people and remind them of the vulnerability we are making for ourselves in order to try to protect a few business models that depend on artificial monopolies sustained by lobbied congressmen and deliberately created ignorance ( EULA - "You will not disassemble to find out how this software works").
We seem to have fallen into some sort of trance where we think we can go after problems with a lawyer and a pen. I believe we are really setting ourselves up for a rude awakening when the same shit we foist on other countries comes back on us. We can even have law-makers stand behind podiums emblazoned with the great seal of the United States, make speeches, shake hands, sign papers, but that's not going to stop some computer relentlessly executing code that's been uploaded into it.
One of the reasons I am working a lot with Arduino type stuff is I believe the microcontroller is one of the last pieces of programmable helpers that I can truly trust.
I just hope we don't have to have the house burn down in order to teach respect for fire safety.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 18 2015, @11:57AM
For me the important thing isn't how accurate a cyberthriller with a 30-35% rating on rottentomatoes portrays hacking, it's whether our legislators see the movie a week or two before voting on the usual crap cybersecurity bills. Maybe Sony will hand free tickets to lawmakers so they can see this well-timed Universal Pictures film.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 18 2015, @01:15PM
Given the recent events at Sony, I guess they make it required watching for their employees.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.