I’ve always hated Hollywood’s attempts at making hacker movies. A good movie to me is one that I can slip into and become engulfed by the story line. With hacker movies, they are always doing something fictitious, impossible, or highly improbable and it completely ruins the movie for me. I can’t slip into it. I spend the whole time judging it’s authenticity. I can’t think of a single hacker movie that I’ve enjoyed, except maybe Swordfish (and that was only because it had a scene in it that redeemed the whole move).
Then I watched the latest episode of the Code Room. Besides featuring an all star cast (of security geeks…sorry, Halle Berry isn’t in this one) it was entirely plausible and technically accurate. They showcase some of the most common vulnerabilities in a system and pit white hat vs. black hat hackers against each other in my all time favorite travel destination, Las Vegas. In addition to being entertaining, it’s also a good wake up call to those developers who aren’t very security conscious.
Spread the word, every developer should watch this and realize that this kind of thing does happen.
Video: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060223CodeRoom3/manifest.xml
-Eric Marvets