In honour of October being Cyber Awareness Month, we here at FixMeStick are going to count down the top seven best hackers in film! To celebrate the month, why not watch a few?
David Lightman – Wargames
- Averts a nuclear disaster by challenging a super-computer to an endless game of tic-tac-toe. When the computer starts playing itself, and realizes that it can’t win (which is debatable, we slowed down the footage, and it looks like there were some opportunities that were not taken advantage of in those tic-tac-toe games), it realizes that nuclear war ALSO has no winner, and doesn’t launch the missile. Lightman teaches the computer that when it comes to nuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.
Neo – The Matrix
- You might be thinking that Neo should be higher on this list, given that he ends up essentially hacking the whole world around him, making him a god-like figure. But, he also takes a lot of credit at the beginning of the movie for being a pretty sweet hacker, and it turns out he was using a computer that was a figment of his imagination to hack systems that were also a figment of his imagination. So not that impressive, really. Keanu.
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Boris – Goldeneye
- Boris’s brilliance, and place on this list, is cemented in a single scene of Goldeneye. Break Natalya’s code to save a Russian missile satellite from crashing into the Atlantic? Sure. Do it in 12 minutes? No problem. Do it 1 handed, left handed, while twirling a pen in your right hand, a pen that is, in fact a grenade? Boss moves. OK, so he fails to do break the code in the end, but we award him all the points for artistic impression.
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Michael Bolton and friends – Office Space
- The subtlety of their hack deserves some credit, stealing fractions of cents over a long period of time so that no one will ever notice it’s missing. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the plot of soooo many movies. Those fractions get rounded off anyway, so it’s not even really stealing. Kind of. Despite making a small mistake that completely ruins their plan, this team sets themselves apart from the others with their all around awesomeness. Did you see what they did to that printer? Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.
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Stanley Jobson – Swordfish
- Stanley really makes hacking look fun. If Swordfish is anything to go by, the life of a hacker is filled with Halle Berry, fast cars, and some kind of awesome tetris game that will somehow help you steal $9.5 billion. That’s billion, with a B. Also, broken marriages, and custody battles that you end up losing to the alcoholic wife of the porn king of LA. So there’s some good stuff, and some not so good stuff there.
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