Episode: 4567
Title: Movie Recommendations for Hackers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4567/hpr4567.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:05 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4567, for 2026-02-03
Today's show is entitled, "Movie Recommendations for Hackers"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:30:44
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "An overview of movies related to cybersecurity and hacker culture."
Just a forewarning about this episode, it contains spoilers for the movies that I'm
going to talk about. So if you don't like spoilers, you might consider skipping this
episode. The show notes will have a list of the movies that I talk about, so you can watch them
on your own and then come back to this episode later. Hello everybody and welcome to another
episode of Hacker Public Radio. This is Delta Ray. I want to talk today about something a little
different than normal tools or commands, but still very much related to tech and cybersecurity.
I want to talk about movies. So where I work, I actually create a cybersecurity movie library that
has about 40 movies in it, all on DVD or Blu-ray, and I just put it on a shelf and I don't have any
requirement to like check it out or write your name down or anything like that. You just pick it up
because I want to try to reduce the friction it would take or cause somebody to want to watch
a movie, you know, so it's like it's, I want to make it as easy as possible for them. I do put
stickers on the movie cases that say, hey, this is from work so that hopefully they'll bring it back
sometime. But the original reason why I put this cybersecurity movie library together in a list was
pretty simple. I realized that I and a lot of other colleagues of mine would casually reference movies
when talking about cybersecurity. Stuff like, this is like what happened in war games, or it's like when
they magically decrypt the network stream in sneakers, or I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do
that. I started noticing that the younger colleagues often didn't have these reference points, not because
they weren't interested, but simply because they had never seen those movies or they didn't know
about them. So I created a small cybersecurity movie library at work to help reduce that friction.
If someone wanted to understand a reference, they could just borrow the movie, or hopefully they would
just watch through a whole bunch of the movies so that the next time they heard one, they'd realize
it right away. What I didn't realize at the time was a lot of people don't have DVD players anymore,
or Blu-ray players. So they didn't really know how to consume the movies. Unfortunately, I can't just
upload rips of the movies to someplace because this is a work-related function and stuff. And I don't
want to get in trouble with the law at work, or at all, really. But it also helped me to step back and
think that these movies weren't just about nostalgia. They're part of how our field developed a shared
language and even some of the technology and techniques that we use. Movies and TV shows that
are about computers and security do a few things for the public. They put a face on cybersecurity and
computers. They can show the motivations of attackers and defenders. They demonstrate the
threats and the exploits in a way that can be seen visually and better understood. And they show
security controls, even if they're not perfect. Sometimes they will show controls that are hard
to demonstrate, or even you'd only read about them in a textbook, but the movie will actually show how
they work. One example of that is in Mission Impossible. In Mission Impossible, they're trying
to break into the CIA into a protected computer enclave. And the system administrator, when he
needs to get into that room, he has to go through several security checks. And so you can just
plainly see this is how like an eye scanner works, or this is how a pressure sensor works, and so on.
And sometimes they even prophesize about future concerns, like, you know, the next movie that I'm
going to talk about. Another thing they do is they give us a common vocabulary to use when talking about
these things. For instance, War Games, you know, War Games was one of the early computer hacker
movies, but the term war driving, actually, and war dialing, comes from that movie. That's the war in
War Games became war and war dialing, and so on. And also, these movies can be entertaining to watch. You
know, you can watch it with friends and family, and it feels less like you're learning something, and it
usually takes less time than reading through a textbook or something like that. So the first movie
I want to start with is, let's go back to nearly the beginning of things. And this is a movie called
2001, A Space Odyssey, in which it talks about what it might be like to, when man ventures out into
space. And in the movie, there's a high-powered computer called HAL 9000, which runs the life
support systems and the communications for the spaceship. And it has some problems, or it makes a
mistake in the movie. I'm not going to give too much away, but basically, you know, it has some problems, and
they have to deal with those problems, and so on. It raises some ethical and social and
technological questions that we're still wrestling with today. Should AI be implicitly
trusted? What happens when it lies? Should it manage life-critical systems? What happens when
corporate pride overrides safety? You know, and we're still, you know, even though it's 60 years
later, we're still trying to figure these questions out. So HAL 9000 isn't necessarily evil,
and in the traditional sense, it's just constrained and conflicted and operating under bad incentives.
That alone makes the movie endlessly relevant. And culturally, references like Open the Pod Bay
Doors How are still shorthand for when automation goes wrong. You know, you'll hear professionals make
that reference. Or, I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Fast forwarding about 13 years to
the 80s. And one thing you have to understand about the 1980s in society, it's when everybody started
to, you know, think about computers a lot more. You know, they started really showing up in people's
daily lives. And I mean, I'm kind of biased because I was young in the 80s, and so it just always seemed
like people were talking about computers to me and stuff. But from what I can tell, this is, the early 80s
is when people really started to fear, you know, what could happen with computers and how we're putting all
this data everywhere. And they're, you know, connected in our lives and so on. And you're basically just
turned into numbers in a computer. You know, your bank account balance and so on are just numbers in a
computer that can be modified and so on. And so Tron, which came out in 1982, kind of took that in an
interesting way. I would argue that Tron is kind of a, even though it's thought of as a digital
gladiator movie and stuff, and I think a lot of people don't quite get it. But I think it's actually
a modern telling of Jesus Christ as a digital form because there's a lot of things that actually
happen in the movie that, but I mean, it's just kind of obvious that, you know, it's making these
religious references and everything. But Tron isn't necessarily focused on being a cybersecurity
movie, but it does introduce a lot of security concepts. You know, passwords are in it, they break
into systems, they talk about access levels and so on. And of course, Tron is most known for being a
trailblazer of computer graphics before he is even called CGI. In fact, the movie was so far ahead of
the game that they were disqualified at the Oscars for special effects because they said, well, they
cheated by using computers, which is pretty funny now. But for a lot of people, it was their first
exposure to seeing terminals and mainframe and hearing about access levels and monitoring of
computers and command injections and passwords and so on. The AI concepts were pretty advanced for the
time. You know, the master control program, Intron, was basically a form of AI. And the guy in the real
world that communicates with it, he just talks to it plainly the same way we would talk to like chat GPT
now, and so on. And so that was not possible at the time, right? It was, you had to suspend your
sense of disbelief about that being a possibility. But of course, fast forward to today, that is a
possibility, except for the MCP had its own motivation and stuff. And we haven't really seen that play out
with computers yet. It was able to punch its own buttons, essentially. Tron helped normalize the
idea that computers are environments with rules and permissions and consequences, and that matters. And
people refer back to it. For a lot of people, it was very influential, myself included, and it kind of
kicked off having computers as themes in movies. The following year, a movie with very relevant
concerns came out called War Games. Now, one thing you have to understand, if you didn't grow up in the
80s or before, and maybe you were born in the 90s or something, you probably don't have the latent fear
about nuclear war. But back in the 80s, we were very worried about the escalation of nuclear weapons and
how the world could basically have ended in about 15 minutes, if, you know, one side, either the Soviet
Union or the US started launching nuclear weapons. And so this movie, it explores the idea that nuclear
weapons were starting to be, I don't want to say automated, but they were starting to be hooked up to
computers. And there was a lot of concern about that, you know, could somebody dial in to a computer
at a military base and start World War III? And that's basically the theme of this movie. And so
in the movie, David Lightman, he dials into just a random number, which he thinks is something else,
but ends up being NORAD, the, you know, the North American, I can't remember what the acronym stands
for. But it's basically where we control, you know, the nuclear weapons from. The movie was so
influential that Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, he approached Congress about it after
having watched the movie. And he asked if the scenario was possible. And essentially, his chief
of staff told him, yes, yes, this is technically feasible, I think is what he said. And that led to
some of the first presidential executive orders on computer security. So this movie had quite an
influence. But it introduced concepts about computer vulnerabilities, remote access, ethical
dilemmas, it showed some social engineering, which was great. One of the scenes that I really like is
in the movie, David Lightman, he gets into trouble in class in high school intentionally, they don't really
say that. But I think that he intentionally was getting himself into trouble so that he could be
sent down to the principal's office, so that he could actually see where they keep the passwords
on like a sheet of paper, because he knew where these, these passwords were kept for the school's
computer. So he gets himself into trouble so that he can go down to the office and see that list to see
what the latest updated password was, which was pencil. And they had basically crossed out all the
previous passwords. They had this practice of changing the password, which is good, but they
kept it in a place that was known. So that's, and that's bad. But so he sees it, and then he later
uses it to actually log in and change his grades. So it's, you know, it's this interesting social
engineering type of thing. And also like an insider threat, you know, you have to worry about who already
has access and what they can do. And also kicked off kind of a generation of hacker culture. You
know, lots of things in that movie became references. I remember even when I was a kid, I was about
seven or eight when this movie came out. I remember hearing about it at the time, and one of my friends
saying something, you know, he was trying to show off or whatever and talking about like, oh yeah,
our school has a computer too. And his password is pencil sharpener. And I'm just like, I'm like,
okay, probably was making that up. But yeah, but I mean, it shows how it was so influential that kids
were even talking about this movie. And unfortunately, nuclear escalation still remains relevant and a
concern, maybe even more so now. I don't know whether younger, the younger generation isn't probably
going to think of it as that big of a deal. But I mean, we went through a time that it was very
scary. That same year, and like I said, in the public mind, computers were starting to become
dangerous, you know, to them. And that same year, a movie called Superman 3 came out. Of course,
this was the third episode, you know, the third movie in a series of Superman movies from the 70s to
the 80s. People probably don't think of it as the computer Superman movie, but really it kind of
was. In the movie, he has to deal with computers kind of wrecking the lives of people and stuff like
that. And also, he has to deal with a supercomputer at the end that kind of takes over things and he has
to try to defeat it. You know, it shows lots of things about computers in people's daily lives and how
they're like doing things wrong, like spitting out money onto the street from ATMs, or the wrong
account balance was put into somebody's account or something like that. Among other things in the
movie, it demonstrates data manipulation, rounding errors in computers. It also shows two-factor style
controls. So there's a scene that's kind of interesting where one of the guys has to use two
keys at the same time to get access to this computer. Like you have to actually be two separate
people because it's too far away. You know, you can't reach out both hands and touch both key
spaces. So you need two people at the same time. So you kind of jury rigs this contraption to help
them to do it. But you know, that's like a two-factor control. So that's Superman 3. I think it's a good
one to watch. There are probably other movies in the 80s, you know, that dealt with computers, but
none that I could really think of until 1990. It's called The KGB, The Computer and Me. And this is
based on a book called The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. It's a movie that was made for PBS,
the program Nova, which was a popular science documentary series back then. But it's based on
a real event that happened at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs back in 1987, I think it was.
It's where Cliff Stoll, who is, you know, a system administrator at the time working at this national
lab, he finds a 70 cent discrepancy in accounting, and he tries to track it down. And he ends up on the,
you know, on the trail of trying to figure out how this hacker was gaining access to their systems.
It's really interesting. And I highly recommend reading the book, The Cuckoo's Egg, because it
goes into a lot of detail about how computers worked back then. I feel when I read that book,
I feel like I'm reading Genesis for cybersecurity, because so many of the concepts in there are like
the first time it was used. You know, it's like, you're reading about this stuff, and you realize,
oh, wait, Cliff Stoll actually came up with this, or something for tracking this down. So it's a
pretty interesting book. And the dramatization, you know, the KGB, the computer in me is a pretty good
representation of the events that are documented in the book. And it's actually reenacted by the
people who actually were there and doing it. So it's really cool to watch. You can find that
movie on YouTube. And, you know, you can get the Cuckoo's Egg, you can like buy it off of
online used bookstores or something. In that movie, you know, he talks about real networks,
how they're interconnected, how they worked, real accounts, how phone tracing worked back then,
how the investigative process took place, and how you have to be patient, and so on,
and looking for clues, and so on. And it does, it does it all pretty realistically.
If you only watch one thing on this list, on this list of movies, this might be the one.
I don't want to say you should skip the other ones, but this is definitely a must watch.
And then two years later, a movie called Sneakers came out. This was pretty prophetic as well.
It introduced to the public concepts like cryptography, and trust models, and who we're
trusting with our information, and unintended consequences of all that. Ethical dilemmas,
you know, like if you have access to be able to decrypt stuff, should you be allowed to do that,
and so on. And many of these issues it raises are still ones we're actively dealing with today.
You know, so it's fun. It's a nice movie. It has Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, and some others in it.
It's a good ensemble cast movie with an interesting story behind it and everything, and still relevant.
A few years later, and thinking about the actual history of the world at the time, this is the mid-90s,
is when the World Wide Web started showing up, and people started getting access through stuff like
AOL, and BBSs, and so on. And so people started getting access to the internet. But really,
1995 was still just about a year too early before you start really thinking about the broader adoption
of people getting access online. That probably didn't happen until 96 or 97.
But so in 95, this movie called The Net came out, which was a Sandra Bullock. At the time,
a lot of made fun of that movie, The Net, and I think it's because they felt like some of the
representations of computers were unrealistic and stuff like that. But it's funny, in hindsight,
this movie, The Net, was very telling of problems that we would face later, because it deals with
things like identity theft, isolation, what happens if, you know, the dangers of remote work,
and having all our data in computer systems that could be manipulated, and the importance of knowing
real people in real life, and not just living your entire life online. So this movie talks about
those kind of issues. And those are really relevant today, because today we have problems with identity
theft, and we have problems with all our information is only in digital form. And changing that could
really cause us problems. And it might be really hard to prove your existence if you don't have some
kind of reference of a person or somebody that can vouch for you or something like that. My dad just ran
into this. So he needs to get like a real ID star on his driver's license. He needed to look for his
actual birth certificate from, you know, a really long time ago. And in order to prove who he was,
so that he could actually get a real ID star on his driver's license. Well, first of all, I mean,
those can be faked, right? But second of all, it's like, some people don't have those anymore.
And so what are they supposed to do if we suddenly depend on everybody having a real ID star on their
driver's license? And they can't, you know, like elderly people can't get it because they don't
have their birth certificate anymore. That's not fair to them. So, you know, the net deals with these
kind of issues. And it's kind of fun. Yeah, it's a good movie. And then the same year, a movie called
Hackers came out. And this is basically a Hollywood portrayal of what computer hacking is like.
Very 90s in its visuals and everything. And, you know, like the hackers, they use rollerblades and
stuff like that. And they're dressed like it's the 90s and it's in New York City and stuff. The
visuals are very flashy. You know, it's the way that they represent certain things is so far-fetched.
You know, it's just like computers aren't really like that. I did leave off Jurassic Park from this
list, but that's another one that maybe you could have on this list. But that would be in 93. So I
didn't include Jurassic Park there. But that's another one where she uses a 3D file system viewer,
which really did exist. So, you know, the whole thing in Hackers where they show them going through
the file system and it's in 3D. Yeah, one could argue that that actually was possible, but it wasn't
how normal computers were. You know, you'd had to have a Silicon Graphics workstation to be able to do
stuff like that. But the movie does demonstrate real vulnerabilities. It talks about real things that
end up being cybersecurity terms. It demonstrates shoulder surfing. It's subtle when it happens,
but there's a scene in which you see somebody shoulder surfing to try to get somebody's password.
They talk about worms and viruses and that there's a difference between the two. And they show,
you know, like proxies and internet routing and so on. It also talks about operational technology risks.
You know, what happens if a computer is in control of a large ship and what that might mean. Its plot,
maybe at the time, seemed unrealistic, but it's really not. One of my roles in my professional
job as a cybersecurity researcher was talking about operational technology. And some of the stuff
that's shown in the movie Hackers from 30 years ago, I would say is not out of the realm of possibility.
Now, you know, computers are largely, I mean, ships and, and so on are largely computer controlled. And
this is obvious to us now, but back then it was maybe not so obvious and it seemed a little far
fetched. And it's funny because Superman three deals with the same thing. All the ships are computer
controlled and they all end up going to the center of the Atlantic ocean or something in the movie. So
it's kind of interesting throwback there, but it's, it's imaginative, it's stylized, and it was
influential. I think that if anything, it's kind of like a music video, you know, hackers was influential
at the time to the up and coming real hackers and techies of the day as to, you know, something to
have on in the background. So you can like, you know, enjoy just killing time or something like
that, or maybe while you're actually hacking or something like that. Again, some of the stuff is
not super realistic in it, but there is a lot of stuff that is. The next movie is not necessarily
a computer movie, but it does deal with stuff that we care about in cybersecurity. And that's
Gattaca. Gattaca was a movie from 1997. It looked at a future society, kind of like a dystopian
society in which everything is controlled through your DNA. Like they, your access to buildings is,
is done through like a pinprick on your finger to get a blood sample. And then they allow you in based
on that, you know, what jobs you're given and stuff is based on your DNA and your genes and so on.
And in the movie, somebody who wants to have, you know, they aspire to do something great is not
allowed to do it because their genes, you know, basically indicate that they wouldn't be able to do
it or something. So they overcome that. But it's a great movie for thinking about things like privacy
of health information and genetic data and how that can be misused and identity theft and stuff like
that. So it's, it's a cool movie to watch and kind of scary, honestly. And it, it really drives home
the idea of what is it that we're really protecting in cybersecurity when we're talking about things like
PHI and so on. And then two years later in 1999, a comedy came out called Office Space. Office Space is
great to watch just if you work in an office, you know, and if you work in IT, it's a great movie to watch
just so that you kind of, you know, you'll relate a lot to a lot of the things that happen in that movie, the
way different employees act and so on, and frustrations with corporate policies and stuff like that. Did you
remember to put the cover letter on your TPS report? You know, you'll finally understand that
reference. But in the movie, it also deals with several cybersecurity concepts, insider threats,
viruses, rounding errors. And this is, it's funny, in this movie, they, they make a reference to
Superman 3 by, they say, oh, it's like in Superman 3, or something like that, because they kind of do
the same thing that Richard Pryor, Pryor's character does in Superman 3. And it also talks about
the Y2K bug, not in detail, but in the movie, they're actually dealing with, you know, preparing
software for the Y2K switchover. And it gave us also a lot of cultural references, like the red
stapler and so on, and 35 pieces of flair, and so on. So by watching this movie, you'll understand a lot
of those references that get made by other people, you know, that you work with. One on here that I
didn't include is the Matrix Reloaded. If you, I mean, the Matrix, you know, it's all about living
inside of a computer simulation, stuff like that. But in the Matrix Reloaded, they actually use a real
SSH vulnerability in it to hack the power grid, and so on. So that can be interesting to watch,
because it was, it was real, you know, it was like they use SSH in a command line in the movie,
and they use a real vulnerability that existed at the time. Going forward to a more obscure one,
and one that isn't necessarily cybersecurity, but deals with surveillance a lot. And this is called
The Lives of Others. And it's from 2006. It's a German movie. And you, you know, you can get it and,
and listen to the, the dubbed English dialogue, or watch the subtitles. But you know, it goes slow
enough that, that you can read the subtitles fairly easily, and it won't be much of a problem. But
really good movie. Scary, not horror scary. But man, I, I was just kind of like taken aback.
After I watched this, I'm like, wow, the East German Stasi, which is their secret police,
had the ability to do a lot of stuff that, you know, you're just like, wow, I, you know,
is our government doing this to us? And we just don't know it. It shows surveillance, interrogation
techniques, which aren't really intense, but they're just very psychologically manipulative and
sneaky. You know, the, the stuff that they show, you're just like, whoa, that's, that's crazy. I
didn't even realize that that was a thing. State, you know, monitoring of things. And the ending is
really great. So The Lives of Others, it's a really great movie. Then there's a TV series that came after
that in 2011 called Person of Interest. And it deals with mass surveillance, you know, in the wake of
9-11. They basically hook all cameras and TV streams and people's email and everything. All this data
goes into a massive supercomputer that basically is AI and is able to try to detect when the next attack
will be. What it also does is it feeds off clues to its creator about other people who might get
murdered or who are likely to get murdered. And so in the series, they, they try to prevent those
murders. This is a really cool TV show and, you know, shows lots of tech at the time, some of which
is a bit far-fetched and they use some tech speak, techno babble that doesn't really work. But some of
the stuff they show actually was real and, and was, you know, real hacks and real security controls at
the time. So in the show notes, I'm going to include a list of cybersecurity movies and TV shows
that I've included in the cybersecurity movie library. If you have some others that you have
suggestions for, drop them in the comments. Also, you know, you might just, if you have other insights
into these movies that you think is relevant, please make a comment. And if you could go ahead and
record a Hacker Public Radio episode, that would be great. Thanks. End of line.
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