What’s the worst hacker scene you’ve ever seen in the movies?

I asked Joseph Menn, the technology projects reporter for Reuters in San Francisco and the author of All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster and Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet. Here’s what he said:

This is a common theme among hackers and security folk. The general consensus is that none of the movies have gotten it right, though Sneakers and WarGames have defenders. People like Mr Robot a lot. The scenes in that movie Kevin Poulsen advised had the coding right but people didn’t like the rest of the movie.

But actually no, I am not a very visual person myself and do not have one big horrible screw up in mind. Oh wait yes I do — The recent Bond movie where the baddie is going to blow up the Tube. The good guys, who are supposed to be sophisticates, plug the bad guy’s USB into a networked production environment. I think the visualization stuff that came after that was bogus too, I have not checked, but plugging in an untrusted device doesn’t happen in any place with standards.