Are the password cracking methods used in the film remotely realistic?
Prompted by this question Why are computer hackers shown to either be geniuses, or show them doing it in fantastic ways? I trawled my brain to find any examples I could remember of anything resembling realistic hacking or cracking in a movie.
I struggled.
Then I remembered some scenes from the entertaining Sneakers where things didn't seem like magic and looked like they took some effort. Ironically, given the question, the password cracking was necessary
to access a new technology that would enable easy cracking of passwords.
(It's an old movie but I didn't want to spoil a key plot development.)
So my question is this: were the techniques deployed in Sneakers realistic? And, for completeness, what were they? (I haven's seen it for a while)
Best Answer
I love the movie Sneakers, and although I haven't seen it in a long time, I still remember the movie quite well (I espeically like Ben Kingsley shouting "MARTYYYYYY!" lol)
Whistler used his hearing to be able to distinguish different tones. This is actually based on some reality, as there was a story of hackers who managed to make free phone calls by getting the switchboard to think it was receiving a signal from the parent company - here's the article I read recently.
Mother was the electronics guy, essentially the other half of a person if you need to hack into the phone system.
Carl and Crease didn't look like they did much, other than helping with strategy and breaking into places
As far as the black box, in theory it could be possible to make such a device, though I imagine that if such a device DID exist, we wouldn't know about it.
Finally, they did an episode of Mythbusters where they tested some of the ways they could get around some of the devices in Cosmo's office. Sad to say, those ways were shown to be busted, I.E. they only worked in the movie.
Pictures about "Are the password cracking methods used in the film remotely realistic?"
Is the movie Hackers realistic?
The film may not be factually accurate, but for me it has the very essence of what hacking really is, camaraderie, wars, music, emotion and staying awake until 5am breaking into systems, with some well placed references to Orwell 1984, indeed it's a typo.How are hackers portrayed in movies?
Hacking is most often portrayed as a frantic exercise, with fast-paced music to raise the tension while boxes flash up on screen.Password Cracking Methods
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Andres Ayrton, Francesco Ungaro, The Lazy Artist Gallery, Victor Pace