Exploring The Hacker Tools Of Mr. Robot

Megalith

Megalith

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Mr. Robot is a new show that revolves around a cyber-security engineer who moonlights as a vigilante hacker. I haven’t seen it yet because I’m more of a binge watcher, but apparently it’s been very well received, being one of the few shows that actually depicts hacking in a somewhat believable way. Check out some of the software tools that have been used in the show.

The debut season of Mr Robot has received a nod from the security focused twitters for its attempts at trying to keep things for the most part realistic. In the episodes so far we have seen hacker types communicating using IRC, there are Linux boxes as far as the eye can see and the main character wears a hoodie. Of course it is a television show that has to be entertaining so we have to give them some slack in getting a bit creative. So far they seem to be doing a pretty good job at maintaining a balance between the story and what is technically possible.
 
Terrific show. My new favorite. I can't wait to see how it all plays out in next weeks season finale.
 
I'm always wincing whenever Hollywood depicts hacking. CSI: Cyber is one of the worst recent offenders; I only lasted ten minutes on that show before I had to turn it off ("Whoops! There's malware!") I may have to give Mr. Robot a try if they're making a decent effort to do it correctly.
 
evilsofa said:
I'm always wincing whenever Hollywood depicts hacking. CSI: Cyber is one of the worst recent offenders; I only lasted ten minutes on that show before I had to turn it off ("Whoops! There's malware!") I may have to give Mr. Robot a try if they're making a decent effort to do it correctly.
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You should give it a shot. I'd say they went above and beyond to make it as realistic as possible while still making it a good show.
 
Social Engineering, root kits, zero day exploitation, weak cyber security protocols. Its not perfect but its not a Gibson ;)
 
Even outside of the very good job they've done depicting hacking and computers in general (thanks to having, like, actual hackers and security experts on staff), the show is terrific. Cinematography, score, story, acting, really great stuff, and quite the mind fuck at times.
 
I have no idea whether he's crazy as shit, or just psychotic. Whether any of the other cast members are even real or just part of a delusion and the finale has him wake up in the rubber room in a straight jacket.I'm feeling a lot like I'm "Lost" if you know what I mean. :eek::cool:
 
The season needs to wrap up and hopefully comes out on blu-ray (sadly USA is terrible about making that happen) so I can binge on it.
 
if my sister looked like darlene, i'd forget she was my sister at least once a day. 8-P
 
I made the mistake of watching BlackHat after getting into Mr. Robot. (I heard the technical accuracy in the movie were pretty good) It turns out it's mostly accurate portrayal of tech, but that was vastly overshadowed by terrible casting and a discombobulated script.

I hope the success of Mr. Robot proves that shows can both be entertaining and not dumbed down with ridiculously implausible portrayals of IT.
 
The only problem I have with this show is the off chance that it's going to inspire a bunch of "hactivist" idiots who think that "becuz FEELS!", they're in the right and are justified in breaking and breaking into shit.
 
evilsofa said:
I'm always wincing whenever Hollywood depicts hacking. CSI: Cyber is one of the worst recent offenders; I only lasted ten minutes on that show before I had to turn it off ("Whoops! There's malware!") I may have to give Mr. Robot a try if they're making a decent effort to do it correctly.
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Do yourself a favor and wait for the finale... I screwed up and started watching right after ep07 came out. I watched the first few min of ep01, 5 hours later I finished ep07
 
It's a decent show. Elliot is a fucked up individual. I didn't care for the "fight club" twist in the last ep, we'll see what they do in the finale.

The Tyrell Wellick is a bastard. Interesting to see the different degress of psycho-ness in the characters play against each other.

I like to see Christian Slater getting decent work, I'd like to think he's capable of more than his resume for the last 20 years.
 
WHY NO EDIT

I was just going to throw out there that this show is about 200x better than Halt and Catch Fire. That show should be Cancelled And Thrown Into The Dumpster.
 
Binged it last Saturday to get caught up. Less about hacking and hacking tools and more about totally bat-shit crazy. A psycho drama that isn't spoiled by the tech used.
 
Flatline said:
Even outside of the very good job they've done depicting hacking and computers in general (thanks to having, like, actual hackers and security experts on staff), the show is terrific. Cinematography, score, story, acting, really great stuff, and quite the mind fuck at times.
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There's also a lot of subtle stuff that falls on the line in between the art of film making and the hacking technical stuff. It's the combination of real stuff like actually just calling facebook facebook as well as the global substitutions.

Me and the wife were watching and I had to laugh a bit and say "that's awesome." She made me pause it to explain, and it was a scene where they were messing around with someone's account on "accounts.com". I backed it up and explained. I said that's clearly designed to look like gmail. Everyone has a google account. The majority get mail there. Goggle made your gmail login your login to everything else they run. Then you have all the ouath sites that let you log in with titter, or gmail, or facebook. But THEN, ask yourself about all the places that you set up a separate account, but if you forget your password, where does it sen the recovery email to? For so many people that's google. So like he has replaced everything evil corp with evil corp, google to him is just the place you go to compromise people's accounts. It's a big, public target, people organize their lives behind and then proceed to treat as disposable and fail to protect it.

She found that take very unsettling.

And that's throwaway background stuff essentially.
 
macksomerville said:
Social Engineering, root kits, zero day exploitation, weak cyber security protocols. Its not perfect but its not a Gibson ;)
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actually in one of the scenes on the show they are watching hackers and yelling at the tv lol

RISC is good
 
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