Hacker have become popular in Hollywood, with hackers starring in nearly every heist or mystery film. This may be beneficial and detrimental to our careers. How Hollywood portrays our industry.

Takedown

Takedown (also known as Trackdown) is a B-grade movie—a fictionalized and sensationalized account of the tracking and capture of probably the most infamous U.S. hacker, Kevin Mitnick. Also, Based on the book nemesis wrote it, Tsutomu Shimomura, the story tends to glorify Shimomura. Moreover, Mitnick operated in the 1980s and ’90s and eventually went to prison for a couple of years. Now, he is a highly-paid IT security consultant, speaker, and writer.

Swordfish

In Swordfish, Hugh Jackman plays a retired, elite hacker who has been released from a long prison term and is now working in the oil fields and living in a trailer. He is approached by an organized crime figure.

Unfortunately, the hacking is unremarkable and far from real. While gyrating geometric things appear on his screen, Jackman’s persona is seen hacking into extremely secure networks in seconds. They show very little of the actual hard effort that goes into hacking.

Halle Berry’s topless sequence is the most unforgettable portion of this film. Although it has nothing to do with hacking, it adds to the film’s memorable quality.

The Italian Job

Although the MINI Coopers are really the stars of The Italian Job (a remake of the 1969 film of the same name), Seth Green plays Lyle, a hacker among a group of elite thieves, who is able to manipulate traffic signals, among other devices, that make this grand theft possible. Could this hacker have been using Shodan to identify and assist in hacking these devices?

The Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate is an unauthorized account of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Cumberbatch plays a believable Assange as a egotistical, idealist that is out to change the world. Few Americans know that Assange is a famous hacker in his native country of Australia. He broke into the Pentagon, Citibank, NASA, and Stanford University, among other facilities, before being caught.

WikiLeaks was founded to provide a safe place for whistleblowers to make secret state information available to the world when that information reveals the ill deeds of powerful governments. They were responsible for the leaks regarding U.S. military abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in other places.

Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell is a classic Japanese anime film that depicts a future (probably mid-21st century) where humans are part flesh and blood and part bionic. Many people have cyber brains that are part electronic and part grey matter. This cyber brain enhances their cognitive abilities and allows them to plug into larger networks. This is an intriguing concept that is likely to become reality in the very near future.

The story is about a special operations task force that is part police and part military. The lead character is a female officer whose body was destroyed as a young girl. The hacking in this futuristic tale is the even more malicious variety of hacking, the hacking of the human mind.