How Hackers are Portrayed in Movies and Television


The movie Cyber threatens violence in several scenes and has a major and impressive computer hacker villain played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but did we really need a movie that shows computer hackers as violent criminals, hell-bent on destroying a country? A movie that makes computer hackers the people behind 9/11? Maybe.

It’s only fair that we have a bad image of hackers. They steal our precious information and often sell it on or use it for fraud. That’s why you often see people and businesses look at express vpn vs nord vpn articles to see which one offers better protection from hackers. It often feels like an arms race, for every exploit hackers find it is a rush to cover up or combat that weakness from internet protection providers.

But some of this negative press does seem to be a little hyperbolic, and in part this is due to how they’re portrayed in the media. Let’s take a look at how the media shaping the expectations of the public about what computer hackers are and why they’re being portrayed as the bad guys.

Joey: “Oh it’s just a computer. I can do that! I can do it without touching a keyboard.”

Trevor: “I think you are confusing computer with software. They’re really not the same thing. That’s the problem.”

-Joey: Computer Forensics, (Episode 5 of season 2)

S4E4:

“What if your life was a TV show? And the bad guy was trying to break into your TV set so that he could have it be the bad guy?”

In Joey’s analogy, the culprit is just a bug trying to break into his TV set, and by acting normal, he’ll look harmless. So he doesn’t really know what to do but he lets him inside so he can get to work. His belief is that, the more you act normal, the less trouble you’ll get into. He is confident that he can get the bug out of his TV, and is even surprised when it breaks into his room by himself. When the bug finds the TV remote, however, it enters into a game. And this is the last bit of trouble that Joey and everyone is worried about.

But this isn’t a problem that people face every day in our country. Why is this particular kind of computer hacking more frightening than most? Is it because it’s more likely to be in movies? Is it because a computer hacker is portrayed as the person behind 9/11?

Sometimes we’re made to fall in love with Robin-hood type hacker-villains, who’d proceed to ring up something like a list featuring the best Aussie online casino to try and hack, getting away with millions…

“What if your life was a TV show? And the bad guy was trying to break into your TV set so that he could have it be the bad guy?”

The media and the technology sector have an inherent conflict of interest in the field of technology, but I believe this type of malicious hackers and Internet crime is a subject that is so complex and misunderstood that they are always making the same mistakes. So let’s talk about computer hackers from the point of view of a kid who is just trying to do his job.

In the movie Hackers, we see that hacking is a very dangerous task, but the key point is that it is so much more common than most people think it is. When I was a teenager, I had a friend who would “hack” computers for a living. The most common kind of hacking that I did with him was just cracking computer passwords. I found it so interesting that someone could get access to all your confidential information just by typing a few keystrokes into a computer. I got so excited whenever I broke into a network that I never got a good chance to learn about all the possible dangers of hacking. I never thought of it as a violent crime like in the movie Cyber, mostly because I did this under the umbrella of what an “ethical hacker” is.

And ethical hackers are those who try to find exploits in a system so that they can be fixed by the company. They don’t steal or cheat or blackmail or threaten, they find a problem and report it so that it gets solved. This improves our security greatly and prevents cutthroat hackers from accessing our precious information. Because of ethical hackers, platforms such as high roller casino sites are as secure as you experience them today.


Infographic Created By Zoukis Consulting Group – Dedicated Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer

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