Hackers
Starring a very young Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, Hackers is a little-known, little-watched movie from 1995 with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 33%. On the surface, nothing to write home about. But I’ll let you in on a secret. Real hackers love this movie. A whole generation of hackers grew up with this movie, they regularly quote this movie, they idolise the characters, the aesthetic, and the culture.
There’s multiple articles of hackers waxing lyrical about how much they love this movie. Several were inspired to become hackers solely because of this movie, including the first hacker to make $1 million from bug bounties. I even found a YouTube video of IT professionals reacting to movie hacking scenes, where the very first thing said is: “I love Hackers, I watch it every year”. And I am no exception in all this; I was heavily inspired by this movie as young hacker, which is why this entire blog is Hackers themed.
And yet the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads: “Hackers has a certain stylish appeal, but its slick visuals and appealing young cast can’t compensate for a clichéd and disappointingly uninspired story”. The problem is reviewers in 1995 did not get this movie. With that in mind, and given the stature this film has in the community, I’ll be looking at the cultural depiction of hackers as well as the actual hacking. After all, there is no right and wrong; there’s only fun and boring.
The reason hackers like this movie so much is because it was the first film to make hacking look cool, and the first film to really see hacking as subculture. It brought cyberpunk to the big screen, and managed to both juggle the politics and inherent ridiculousness that entails. It’s also unbelievably 90s, complete with floppy discs and inexplicable rollerblades. The consensus does get one thing right though, the visuals in this moving are stunning. Unfortunately I won’t have space to cover them here, but here’s a blog post dedicated to them.
However, I will be covering all the hacks. And there are loads. I mean, it’s literally called Hackers. I want this post to server as my definitive look at a classic, and that means it’s going to be long. Really what I’m saying is: this is one’s for the nerds. So if that’s you, strap in.
Now that I’ve gotten rid of the casuals, I think we’re finally ready to begin. Right after you’ve finished admiring this opening shot where they fade an aerial view of New York into a friggin’ circuit board.
The movie opens with an 11 year old Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy having his door kicked in by a swat team, after he “crashed 1,507 computer systems on the same day”. We don’t actually see the hack in question but, given I was 14 when my hubris was partially responsible for 40,000 websites getting hacked in the same time frame, it sounds is very believable to me. Fortunately no swat teams were called in my case.
Off the back of this, Dade is convicted and banned from using computers or “touch-tone telephones” until his 18th birthday. The film then jumps forward to that very birthday, where like any good hacker he’s already back at it again with the leet hacks.
Note: Given I’m also called Zero Cool, and the fact he goes by Crash Override for most of the film, I’ll exclusively refer to him as Dade to avoid confusion.
1. TV Station Hack
The hack begins with a spot of social engineering. Dade calls the local TV station and pretends to be an employee, tricking the hapless night security guard into giving him access to a modem.
This is a classic type of hack: the weakest link in security is usually a human. Kevin Mitnick became famous for this sort of thing.
After gaining access, Dade then switches the TV programme to one more to his liking. Unfortunately, this alerts another hacker (Acid Burn) to his presence, which leads to a fight over control of the station while they both taunt each other. Dade uses the handle Crash Override for his messages, presumably so Acid Burn doesn’t know he’s really Zero Cool.
This scene is memorably scored by The Prodigy’s Voodoo People. In fact the film’s soundtrack is so good they released three albums of it.
Now, obviously this all looks absolutely ridiculous. For a start, surely magically showing a message on a stranger’s computer like that would requiring hacking them as a prerequisite? Also, what chat program even looks like that?
Both valid questions, and it’s here I should point out while doing research for this review I discovered I’m not the first to write about the hacks in the movie. Cloudbric, a web security firm based in soul, have a review from 2015 called “We Analyze 13 Hacks in the 1995 Movie ‘Hackers’ and How They Compare to Today”.
In that review, they talk about the messages under the heading “Hijacking Another Hacker’s Computer”. However, one of this blog’s motifs is “details matter” and this is a prime example. These messages do not constitute a hack, and I think other reviewers have somewhat misunderstand what this movie’s depiction is really all about. Luckily, Zero Cool is here to set the record straight (sorry Cloudbric).
The thing about Hackers is it came out in 1995. This was at the dawn of graphical computing in terms of the web. The film correctly predicted what was once all text would become largely graphical, but was too early to know what it’d all look like. Text is also considered boring, it wouldn’t be until Mr. Robot that a truly accurate depiction was found palatable in this medium. And so, Hackers went the route of visual metaphors in the form of imaginary graphical interfaces, in order to spice things up.
If you look at the top of the Acid Burn’s message above, you’ll see a strange green line of blurry text, easy to miss and yet crucial for understanding what’s actually happening on a technical level (granted, nobody but me does).
If we zoom in we can just about make it out:
The text says “Message from Root on /dev/ttyp5”. If you’re a hacker, and paying attention, the /dev/tty part is enough to explain everything. It reveals Dade and Acid Burn have hacked into the same TV station Unix server. The unix family of operating servers provide a command line utility called “wall”, which allows users to broadcast messages to everyone else on the system.
So this one blurry line show reveals the scene is really showing two hackers with access to the same server fighting for control, while broadcasting messages to each other. The over the top text is just a visual metaphor, which, as we’ll keep seeing as we go along, Hackers uses an awful lot of.
In terms of hacker history, this battle for control its very reminiscent of the famous Hacker turf war between The Legion of Doom (LOD) and Masters of Deception (MOD). I don’t have time to get into what happened there, and besides it was hugely overblown by the media at the time, but Hackers is clearly very influenced by that story¹.
Far from being ridiculous, this is actually a very accurate depiction. It just relies on visual metaphors to liven things up. And rather than deduct points, given the film’s trying to predict the future while simultaneously being entertaining, I’ll be adding points if there’s still a legitimate hack underneath. So full points here to Hackers, and -10 points to Cloudbric for thinking the messaging constitutes a hack.
2. School Class Hack
Having started at a new school, Dade hacks the school records in order to be in the same class as a girl he’s taken an interest in (Kate Libby, played by Angelina Jolie and later revealed to be Acid Burn). Obviously just because it’s hacking doesn’t stop it from also being stalking.
This hack is short, and eminently believable. I was far younger than Dade when I worked out how to hack my school’s network. I even made a website exposing the poor security of the software company responsible, which they responded to by sending me my very first legal threat. But that’s a story for another time.
Interlude: Strong Looks
The costumes in this movie are outrageous even by 90s standards. Every character has multiple amazing looks, with Phantom Phreak (played by Renoly Santiago) even managing to pull off a leopard skin blazer. I’m not sure if it’s possible to hack fashion, but if so this crew have managed it.
The looks are meant to show how trail-blazing this new subculture is, with some nods to cyberpunk history along the way. For example, Dade wears mirrored shades repeatedly throughout the movie, a clear nod to the Mirrorshades cyberpunk anythology.
All the hackers in this universe seem to hang out at the same joint, a place called Cyberdelia which, rollerblading aside, is still the coolest space I’ve ever seen. And, given the number of warehouse parties I’ve been to in my life, it’s not from lack of trying².
3. Payphone Phreaking
If hacking is breaking into computers, phreaking is breaking into telephone networks. It was popular in the 70s, but became less so as technology and security improved.
Here Ramon “The Phantom Phreak” Sanchez makes a free call by using a makeshift Red Box. Essentially the payphone system used to use the Automated Coin Toll Service, which asked you to put money into the machine. Each type of coin makes a particular sound, and the system would listen out for it to work out how much you’ve put in. By recording those sounds, Phanton Phreak can get free calls by just playing the sound back down the handset.
4. Sprinkler Hack
The first revenge hack of the movie. For context, while showing Dade around, Kate Libby (Acid Burn, but Dade doesn’t know this yet) formally inducted him by telling him to check out the Olympic sized pool on the roof. Once on the roof, Dade realises there is no pool as door locks behind him, trapping him along with the other new students; just in time for the rain.
Dade decides to exact his revenge by hacking into the school’s system and scheduling a sprinkler test for 9:30am the following day.
Given he hacked the network earlier, the only dodgy bit here is the utilities being accessible over the internet. It’s a common trope in Hollywood hacking, and one that’s never that believable as I’ve covered previously. So I’ll leave it at that, except to say visual-metaphor wise the graphical representation of the school looks pretty cool, and this is the best version of this trope I’ve seen.
Interlude: Crayola Books
In a bonding scene in Cyberdelia, Dade is formally introduced to the other (male) hackers. Ramon “The Phantom Phreak” Sanchez, Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein and Joey Pardella. Cereal Killer pulls out a bunch of books useful to hackers, which Dade then has to name in order to demonstrate his hacker knowledge.
Descriptions of all 6 books are available here. A lot of them are before my time, but I’ve read the Devil Book and the dreaded Dragon Book, as both are useful to computer scientists even today. It sounds silly, but having a macho dick-waving contest over what technical manuals you’ve read is something that’s relatable to hackers of a certain generation.
Cereal Killer’s real name being Emmanuel Goldstein should set off the spidey sense of any hacker, as it’s the name of a renowned real-life hacker who was an uncredited technical consultant on the film (and is himself named after a character in Nineteen Eighty-Four). He’s the editor of the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and the lead organiser of biennial HOPE hacking convention. This guy has serious chops, and should be a clue the hacking in this movie is far from the usual h0llyw00d h4x1ng.
The scene also sets up Joey “momma dresses me” Pardella as a relative neophyte, who doesn’t even have his own hacker handle and is yet to prove himself with a “righteous hack”.
Which leads us nicely to the next hack of the movie.
5. Hacking the Gibson
Perhaps the film’s most famous export is the idea of hacking the Gibson, which has seeped into the popular consciousness of the internet at large.
The visual metaphor for the Gibson supercomputer is this blog’s logo, and whereas we don’t really see the hack itself, the fact it looks amazing means I forgive it. However, it is neatly explained later that he broke into the system by just guessing the password of an account (God), which just so happened to be one of the most commonly used passwords discussed in the Crayola scene.
As proof of the hack, Joey downloads a file from the supercomputer. Unfortunately, Joey doesn’t cover his tracks, and so gets detected by none other than Pen Jillette, who I swear is in everything from my childhood.
This leads to Joey going through the apparent rite-of-passage for any serious hacker: having their door broken down by the Feds.
6. Hacking the NCIC
This time the hack is by the bad guy: Eugene “The Plague” Belford. He’s the security officer for the company Joey hacked into (Ellingson Mineral Company), and a not-so-former hacker.
He breaks into NCIS in order to run background into Dade’s family and history, in the hope he can use it to extort Dade into helping him retrieve the file, which actually contains incriminating evidence about a fraud he’s been running. I won’t cover the fraud scheme itself as it’s quite convoluted, involving a “worm” which capsizes boats being used as a cover for penny shaving transactions (stealing small amounts every time an amount is rounded). If that sounds familiar, it’s also a plot point in Superman III and Office Space.
We don’t see much of The Plague’s hack, although he does say he used social engineering in the form of impersonating an Alabama state trooper. I’d have ideally liked more information, as going from state trooper to full NCIC access seems like a bit of a leap. However, this guy must be really talented. After all, this the 90s, surely they wouldn’t let just anyone be security officer of a massive company?
Later on in the movie he ups the ante and uses his access to fabricate crimes on Dade’s mum’s record, thus making her a wanted fugitive.
Interlude: Hacktivism
Hackers is an overtly political film, and one that was eerily prophetic regarding what Hacktivism would later become. After all, the film opens with news of Dade’s hack on Wall Street servers. The antagonists of these movies are high ranking employees of a multinational corporation (Ellingson Mineral) and the Secret Service. The Ellingson employees are trying to frame the poor hackers, whose crime is curiosity, for their own corporate malfeasance.
The hackers themselves are portrayed to be communal, anarchic, and interested in the free flow of information. The film also directly quotes The Conscience of a Hacker (also known as The Hacker Manifesto), and was ahead of its time in more ways that I can count.
The type of hacktivism this film predicted now exists, and I think this movie has played a part in that. What higher praise is there to give?
7. Hacking Contest
For reasons that can be summed up with the words “fragile masculinity”, Dade challenges Acid Burn to a hacking contest. They both have to “hassle secret agent Richard Gill” (played by Wendell Pierce aka Bunk from The Wire), as revenge for him arresting Joey.
But first, let’s see our heroes prepare for the big contest:
This last shot is interesting, as it shows Acid Burn has jotted down various phone numbers of interest, including the Mayor’s Office and the Secret Service. Presumably some of these are for dialling into directly with her computer.
With the prep done, let the hacks begin!
Cancelling Gill’s credit card
Acid Burn manages to log into Concourse Bank and then cancel Gill’s credit card. Although, seems a bit weird the bank has a website that lets you do that?
Just kidding. Details matter! Just before that first shot, there’s another shot that’s on screen for literally milliseconds. It was a genuine pain to get a screenshot of it:
But we’re rewarded by seeing that, no, that bank login is not a website. No points for guessing which other review assumed it was (sorry Cloudbric).
Remember, this is 1995. The web as we know it today did not exist back then. Instead, the page is a visual metaphor for hacking into an FTP server, which very much did exist back then. The “open con. bnk cust dbase” line isn’t realistic, but it’s only there to roughly explain what’s going on to the eagle-eyed viewer. FTP servers are notoriously insecure, to the point the only one I’d say is secure is vsftpd and I don’t think that was even first released until 1999.
Creating a fake personal ad for Gill
This one you wouldn’t even think would need a hack, but seemingly Dade edits an existing ad. No information is given to how he breaks in, and the whole premise strikes me as at best childish and at worst transphobic through a 2019 lens, so the less said the better.
Fabricating a DUI for the State of NY
Some more cool UI here, we see some output showing the IP connection to the server, which is another FTP server, followed by a visual metaphor for adding the DUI.
More interestingly, just before that we see some UI for the actual internet connection. The internet is a huge series of tubes, and so information to and from a server (e.g website) is treated a bit like a relay race, being passed through several other servers en route.
Hackers these days just obscure their location by “hopping” through multiple VPNs, proxies, and random computers they’ve hacked previously. To track them you would have to work your way backwards through a long daisy chain of computers, which just isn’t feasible.
But back in 1995 home computers weren’t on 24/7, and VPNs and proxies didn’t really exist. And so to cover their tracks the team dial the initial connection from public pay phones, or in this ludicrous example from the top of the Empire State building! Clearly not a workable place in reality, but the logic of using pay phones to dial specific servers directly and then using that as a springboard seems fairly solid (although this type of hacking is before my time).
Declaring Gill dead in the Secret Service employee records
Like the personal ad, we don’t really see how the hack itself done, but the UI for the employee records is terminal themed and looks pretty snazzy.
Interlude: Stuyvesant High School
Dade moves to NY aged 18, and enrols in the local high school. There, literally everyone he meets turns out to be a hacker. Obviously quite far fetched, right?
Well, I did some background and turns out the school scenes were filmed in Stuyvesant High School, a fancy prep school in Manhattan for the academically gifted.
Several high profile hackers were students there in the 90s, including ZOD, a member of the famous hacker group Masters of Deception, and Sabu, the co-founder LulzSec. Apparently the school even had a full hacker subculture throughout 90s. Evidently this place was some sort of X-Men school for hackers.
8. Ellingson Mineral Company Infiltration
This hack involves infiltrating Ellingson Mineral Company itself, and happens in three different ways:
Dumpster Diving
A time-honoured tradition in corporate hacking: raiding the dumpsters. You’d be shocked what kinds of confidential information gets carelessly tossed into the trash. This is a technique hackers and penetration testers use to this day, except for maybe the bit where Acid Burn fires at flare at a security guard.
Direct Infiltration
Paul “Lord Nikon” Cook is tasked with direct infiltration. I think he’s the coolest character in the movie, and was a real inspiration to me, but he doesn’t do much hacking and so isn’t featured much in this review.
Here he wanders around the office carrying flowers and looking over people’s shoulders to see who’s typing in passwords. This is another technique that sounds far fetched, but is actually one of the most realistic. People in offices do not check over their shoulders before putting in passwords, especially after lunch when they get back to their computers and need to log in.
You may ask how he got into the office in the first place. We don’t see, but he almost certainly just walked in. Most building security is really bad. They probably didn’t have key fob entry here, and even if they did if you look like you’re meant to be there you can usually either just follow someone else in, or social engineer (sweet talk) the reception staff.
There’s a well known story in tech called the Graphing Calculator Story. It’s about a couple of Apple contractors who were working on a graphing calculator in the early 90s. The project sadly got cancelled, and so they snuck into the offices and carried on working on it for several months. People saw them around so much, they just assumed they worked there.
Wiretapping
Another physical hack, this time by Emmanuel Goldstein. He plants a wiretapping device under the desk of Margo Wallace, head of PR at Ellington Mineral and partner-in-crime to The Plague.
I’ve never installed a wiretap device myself, but it seems to be hooked to the phone line complete with an RJ port, so I’ll take it on faith this would work.
With reconnaissance a success, the gang are almost ready for the final hack and the climax of the film. But first they have to get to Grand Central Station, while being chased by the Feds. If only there was a way to create a distraction by, say, making all the traffic lights green…
9. Hacking the Gibson (again)
The gang are hacking the Gibson in order to retrieve the rest of the file Joey downloaded earlier, which will prove their innocence and implicate The Plague as the true criminal mastermind. However, that takes time and he’s not going down without a fight. Unluckily for them, he has full control of the Gibson and they do not.
Given we don’t see them hacking in, and we already know they did it by using valid login details gleaned earlier, I won’t be focusing on hacking in the usual sense. Instead, I’ll be looking at the plausibility of their plan to keep The Plague occupied.
Their plan is to overload The Plague with viruses. Simultaneously launching as many as they can, so he’s too busy dealing with them to kick them off, giving them time to find this darn file.
So, let’s go through the viruses…
Smiley Face
This one’s Joey’s virus and appears to just take over all the screens with bouncing smiley faces. It doesn’t appear to be named, and I only include it because the face iconography is particularly memorable.
Cookie Monster
Well obviously this one looks absolutely ridiculous, it’s an animated Cookie Monster that’s eating the screen. And you stop it by typing the word “cookie”. Where the hell did this lot go to hacker school, Sesame Street?
I confess before sitting down to write this review, I assumed this entire scene was total nonsense. But given the film’s penchant for visual metaphors, I watched again more closely.
Turns out, Cookie Monster is a real virus. The virus copies itself, it really does occasionally put “I want a cookie” on the screen, and you really do stop it by typing in “cookie”. Sure there’s no picture of a monster, but as visual metaphors go I can’t fault it.
Rabbit
This virus also appears to eat the screen and, you guessed it, is also a real virus. The idea is it replicates so much it takes up all the system’s resources. These days the more official name for such an attack is a fork bomb, for reasons I won’t get into. Point is, they’re very real and can be very deadly.
The rabbit scene also contains my favourite exchange in the entire movie: “A rabbit is in the administration system”, “Send a flu shot!”.
Even with that, surely it’s not enough to overload what is essentially a supercomputer? Funny you should ask. So, even with 5 people The Plague still manages to comfortably boot most of them out. That is, until the cavalry arrives in the form of hackers from all around the world.
You very briefly see the screen of one of these new hackers, and I thought I’d include it because it’s about the only example of genuine computer code showed in the entire movie.
I was really puzzling over what this is. It turns out to be the source code to LANtastic, a LAN operating system designed for DOS. I was debating whether or not to deduct points for this: on the one hand it’s not very hacking related, on the other hand the graphical depiction of satellites is really cool.
But then I did more Googling, and found this:
I’ve mentioned before, but Black Hat hackers love making zines showing off their hacks. This is one such zine from 2015, where Anonymous hacked NASA. You read that right, they HACKED NASA. And they used a script called ‘killthegibson.sh’ to wipe their tracks afterwards. When run, the script appears to delete various log files as well as printing the above. Which, as you can see above, is a painstakingly drawn representation of that exact shot from the movie.
So how on Earth can I deduct points for this when someone who HACKED NASA thinks highly enough of it to put that amount of effort in?
The hackers begin overloading the server, resulting in a Ellingson Mineral lackey exclaiming: “We have massive infection, multiple GPI and FSI viruses”. Turns out even this techobabble is actually legitimate; this is getting ridiculous.
With The Plague sufficiently distracted, Joey is able to get the file just before the entire Gibson overloads. Go team!
In terms of plausibility, recruiting hackers in the manner was surprisingly prescient given that starting in 2014 Anonymous pulled much the same trick to take down high profiles websites such as the RIAA using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. It’s almost like Anonymous were heavily influenced by this movie.
That said, obviously this depiction isn’t perfect. For a start, the entire climax is fairly ridiculous. If the file was so damning, why didn’t The Plague just delete it? And how does it take 5 experienced hackers several minutes to find one file? You can do it in a single command! But each side having easier ways of achieving their goals doesn’t make the way they did do it invalid, and so the depiction still stands.
Interlude: Additional Hacks
There’s two more hacks in the movie, but they’re very Hollywood and don’t merit any analysis. Cereal Killer, with the help of some other hackers, takes over all the TV stations in order to exposes The Plague’s fraud to the world. This has got to be a nod to Max Headroom, and is obviously highly implausible.
Finally, while Dade and Acid Burn are on a date, the gang hack two buildings in order to spell out their names. The only time I’ve ever really seen this for real was an MIT hack, but after all this is a movie and it does look cool.
10. Real Life Hack
As part of the marketing, a promotional website was set up for the film that was, quite predictably, hacked almost immediately.
It’s somewhat ironic the hacker told readers to visit the 2600 website, given the editor thereof was a consultant for the film. Perhaps they realised, as they later wrote in to apologise for the hack.
Conclusion
Given ultra realistic portrayals of hacking are relatively recent, I do grade reviews on a curve. That said, Hackers has a reputation for being a very unrealistic depiction which, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, is throughly unfounded. For the sheer number of hacks, nothing really comes close. And of those, the number that actually stand up to scrutiny to the point even security professionals miss the trick is astonishing.
This movie really paved the way for a lot of things. Wargames bombed so Hackers could skate, Hackers skated so Mr. Robot could hack.
And so with that in mind, all I can really say is: Hack the Planet!
Grade: A
[1] Phantom Phreak introduces himself as the “King of Nynex”, this is a reference to Masters of Deception (MOD) member Nynex Phreak, who is himself named after the NYNEX telephone company. The Plague is named after the MOD member of the same name. The Hacker Manifesto, which is quoted in the film, was written by The Mentor, a Legion of Doom (LOD) member. And, of course, the movie is set in New York where MOD were based.
[2] The interior of Cyberdelia is actually the main pool of the disused Brentford Baths on the outskirts of London. I think there’s something fitting about a room of cyberpunks trying very hard not to damage a Grade 2 listed building.
