Module 11- Hackers

The 1995 film Hackers is based on a group of high school students who hack into a computer of a major oil company.  While the movie was filmed during the being of the internet and personal computer era, some parts of the movie are realistic to modern day computer hacking issues and includes past hacker history.

                The film starts in 1988, where a 12 year old boy is charged with hacking and crashing over 1,500 computers that disrupted production on Wall Street. He is to have no contact with computers or phones until he is 18 years old. In 1995, this boy, Dade Murphy is now 18, and spends his birthday hacking into a television station. He starts going to a new school in New York City, and meets other computer hackers.  This group hacks into a computer for a large oil company and finds that the computer has a virus that is being used as a decoy to cover a worm that is transferring millions of dollars into foreign account. The group of teenagers enlists the help of other hackers world wide to destroy the virus and expose the worm and its creator.

                When I first saw this movie a few years ago, I thought it was entirely bogus and a horrible version of Hollywood’s take on the underground life of computer hackers. I chose to review this movie because I thought it would be easy to write multiple pages as I picked out all the untruths. To my surprise, after watching it few more times, it was actually the complete opposite.  From my research I have determined that you can hack into a computer if you have the modem information and that you can use “phreaking” to make phone calls, which I would then assume would allow for internet access. Some of the pranks that the teenage hackers pulled include: setting a timer on fire sprinkler system in a school, deleting credit card information, changing a persons driving record, and changing a persons status from living to deceased. All these are plausible, but with today’s’ advanced security systems these scenarios would be highly unlikely.  What originally made me think that this film was entirely make believe where the ridiculous graphics of the interworkings of a computer,  showing that memory for this major oil company was stored in an enormous room  with towers of visible information, and file containing the worm was just a weird computer graphic.  This may have been done to help the non-computer user to better visualize how computers work, but it caused an unrealistic feeling for this viewer.

                During this film, the villain explains that major companies are looking for hackers just like him to help run their IT departments and to protect their private information. After a quick Google search, I found numerous articles about how the government is recruiting hackers to aid in national security. It appears that hackers have increased their importance by moving from simple company IT departments to several U.S. Federal agencies.   

                Hackers, whether intentional or not, was released round the same time that a computer hacker named Kevin Mitnick was arrested. H e was charged with: hacking into the Los Angeles bus system to get free rides, hacking into the FBI, hacking into and gaining administrator privileges to the Computer Learning Center (this was done on a bet), and hacking various cellular companies such as Motorola, Nokia and Siemens. Mitnick started his hacking career at the age of 16. While Mitnick’s personal story was not depicted or mentioned during this film, it was a current issue within society.

                I have watched this film now three times. Each time I watch it, I see more of the reality of the story and less of the cheesy Hollywood graphics. As Roger Ebert stating in his review of Hackers, “The movie is smart and entertaining, then, as long as you don’t take the computer stuff very seriously. I didn’t. I took it approximately as seriously as the archeology in Indiana Jones.” This film was entertaining, and after doing a little research into the probability of the ideas presented, I actually learned a little about computer hacking, the demand for hackers, and past famous computer and phone hackers.