Can you hack it?
Stories of cyber attacks have long entertained and now they're more prevalent in the real world than ever
If anyone in the UK has entered a Coop lately, it has resembled the days of lockdown. Bare shelves as far as the eye can. The company has - along with Marks & Spencer - fallen victim to a bunch of hackers which the National Crime Agency believe to be from the US and UK as they are known to be native English speakers, as opposed to the usual suspects from Russia or North Korea.
TL;DR
Read Hack Attack; watch Hackers and Sneakers; listen to The Lazarus Heist; and watch Mr Robot, The Great Hack, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal and Scandalous: Phone Hacking on Trial.
WATCH
Hackers. This movie made me want to write this whole post.
It’s from 1995, it’s hilariously old school, it has an incredible soundtrack that I will still happily play on repeat (& that you should too, particularly if you’re working out) and it’s where Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller met and fell in love. Oh, and it has Fisher Stevens. I mean what more could you ask for?!
I’m not even going to tell you about it other than a bunch of teenagers rollerblade around New York City with laptops in their backpacks, hacking their little hearts out whilst the afore-mentioned Fisher Stevens hunts them down. It’s glorious.
Another old school hit from the ‘90s, and this one simply can’t be ignored because of the cast alone. Released in 1992, Sneakers stars, well, look for yourself:
The film opens with a “Sliding Doors moment” in 1969: Martin (Redford) and Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) are hackers when, after finishing a spell of hacktivity, Martin heads out for food and the authorities swoop in and haul in Cosmo. Cue Martin going into hiding.
Fast forward to modern-day (well, I guess 1992 felt fierce modern to anyone who had experienced 1969…) and Martin now runs a cybersecurity team. Two NSA lads show up and ask him to steal some Russian-designed black box thing (it was 1992, they can get away with nothing being that technologically advanced). But are they really NSA?? And lo unfurls a fun caper. And mostly: you get to look at Robert Redford (then in his 50s) for two hours: what’s not to like!?
READ
Hack Attack by Nick Davies is the story about the phone hacking by the very guy who made sure the full extent of the scandal was eventually revealed.
Initially, there seemed to be one editor and one private investigator from one newspaper who had hacked a few voice mails to members of the royal family. They wound up in court and were sentenced to prison in 2007. Davies had a feeling there was more to it all…and he was right. In the end his reporting led to the closure of the News of the World in 2011.
This book is Davies’ version of what happened: how he told the story in the face of the full force of Rupert Murdoch and News International and brought about the end of a newspaper that was once, not just the UK’s highest-selling title, but the largest-selling English language paper on the planet. It’s a story that at this stage is probably a bit foggy in our memories and boy, do I recommend you remind yourself of just what was uncovered.
LISTEN
BBC Sounds is a wonderfully reliable source of all kinds of audio entertainment.
The Lazarus Heist is yet another example of their high production standards coupled with a wild, fun story expertly told by journalists Jean Lee and Geoff White. We kick off in Hollywood in 2014 when Sony is hacked. From there we learn about a shadowy group of North Korean hackers (yes, really) called The Smoking Dragon and how a faulty printer led to one of the most audacious hacks of all time. Also included: cars chock full of cash, state-operated hackers and even executions. If you are looking for a marmalade-dropper of a story, this is the badger.
WATCH
If you want a great, well-made drama centred around hacking, you can’t go wrong with Mr Robot.
It stars Rami Malek in what was his first starring role as Elliott Alderson, a computer-programmer-by-day/hacker-by-night with all kinds of issues such as anxiety, depression and drug abuse and a loner. He is approached by a mysterious Mr Robot to hack into ECorp and cancel all consumer debt and thus kicking off our cyber-thriller. The show is incredibly technically accurate (creator Sam Esmail worked hard to build an experienced advisory team) but it’s also beautiful to look at as well as having a fun, tense plot to follow.
There are just four seasons, all of which are great and were deemed so at the time by critics. It also won Golden Globes, Emmys and even a Peabody Award. It made a splash when it first landed after first struggling to find a UK broadcaster - I still think it went largely under-appreciated on this side of the pond, so dig in. But be warned: you may wind up even more paranoid that you already are.
And for the final part of this week’s round-up: a couple of real life stories.
Next up: The Great Hack.
This was huge when it first landed on Netflix back in 2019 as it told the full story of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then it was the biggest story in the world: how Cambridge Analytica had scraped data on British and American voters from Facebook and used to manipulate them in the run up to elections or the Brexit referendum.
The show has its own tension as the film’s producers track down Brittany Kaiser, formerly an employee of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company and follows her personal journey on whether she should speak out on what she knows to have happened.
If you missed this first time round, I highly recommend it. Just think what the hell they’re doing to us all now.
& finally, something far more salacious, outrageous and a bit more true-crimey, give Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Scandal a go. It does have a great sense of WHAT were these idiots thinking?!
The hack happened ten years ago by which time the site boasted 37 million users across 40 countries. It will likely not surprise you to learn that the operators of the site weren’t exactly the most upstanding bunch of people to hand you data over to and on whose site you probably not conduct illicit affairs. They offered all sorts of membership to the site, including a full delete of all usage data at the user’s request…yeah, turns out they never did that. In fact, it turns out they didn’t do a lot of things you would consider important: such as consider their security.
Enter the “Impact Team” an as-yet unidentified hack team who threatened to reveal all: the cheating behaviour of the users as well as the dastardly behaviour of the website’s owners. The producers speak to a couple where the husband was unmasked as a cheater and, more poignantly, a woman whose husband killed himself following his exposure as a user of the site - showing the human toll wrought by both the site and the hackers.
The site is still running however, with users numbers higher than ever at 70million. So this is definitely one to file under “What is wrong with humanity” - or should I say “men”.