05 November 2019
Marco Gandolfi
In early October, the fourth season of “Mr. Robot” began - a series whose authors strive to portray the work of a hacker extremely plausible. Everything that the main character uses in his work is used by real hackers: from cloning the RFID tags to using Kali Linux.
But much more often in films and series, the work of computer experts is depicted unrealistically. In some TV series like NCIS, hacking a computer looks like this. Some black windows with codes and diagrams appear on the screen non-stop. And two people are trying to combat this mysterious wonder while desperately pressing random buttons on the keyboard and trying to look smart.
Let’s try to figure out how it happened.
Even though you are unlikely to hack the computer of the President, you can hack your life instead! How about making more money than you could ever dream of by actually relaxing and having fun? The thing is, playing casino games will allow you to do so.
Let’s go back to hacking in the movies.
Consultants, screenwriters and film crew
The main reasons why the Mr. Robot series demonstrates such an outstanding realism of hacker were:
1. The shooting of almost every series was supervised by a large team of specialists.
2. All the specialists were led by the producer of the series, Kor Adana.
3. Kor himself previously was a computer security specialist.
4. Although in the pilot series, everything was a bit wrong. There was only one consultant who, moreover, was not on the set all the time and practically did not contact the scriptwriters and creators of visual effects.
Because of this, the viewers noted several errors at once. Many of the IP addresses that could be seen in this series were very strange. Linux worked as it would never do in reality. And the main character claimed that he was able to track all the traffic from the Tor exit node located in the cafe, although the very possibility of this is a moot point.
To prevent such problems with the image of hacking, Kor Adana conducted tests: together with a team of technical experts, he personally simulated every hacker attack. Then these hacks got into the series in exactly the same form, with the same programs and devices that were used during the tests.
Epic Fails
But nevertheless, Mr. Robot is almost a unique case in this regard - for the majority of films and TV shows, such teams of consultants do not take part in writing AND shooting. Especially for such inexpensive shows as TV series about the police: their scriptwriters should write a lot in a very short time, and in order to save money and time, no one hires the right people to help them.
For example, in Russian TV series about the police called Muhtar’s Return, the policeman gives an IT specialist the copies of email letters printed on paper and asks him to find out an IP address of the sender of these letters. Moreover, the sheets of paper with those “letters” were bland. And, what was an even greater fail, an IT specialist was typing random Russian letters as well as the ipconfig command. For those of you who don’t know, ipconfig command enables you to find out YOUR IP address.
Nevertheless, sometimes scriptwriters realize that they prescribe delusional scenes related to technology - and purposefully make them like that. It’s just that they come up with jokes for the sake of it or use established stamps so as not to bother learning the technical side of the work of programmers. Anyway, in their opinion, most viewers will not even notice such blunders.
To conclude
Hacking in movies and TV shows, for the most part, is just an imitation. The authors try to depict the work of real hackers, but at the same time, copy works that did not seek to show real hacking. But sometimes the filmmakers simply do not want to inspire viewers to commit crimes, showing real hacking methods.
