Page 66 - Cyber Defense eMagazine October 2023

Digital Criminal Ontology; Trading Pistols for

Programmers

By James Allman Talbot, Head of Incident Response & Threat Intelligence, Quorum Cyber

Since computers were first connected with Ethernet cables, Hollywood started romanticizing hackers. In
1983, WarGames was released. The movie was a science fiction thriller starring Matthew Broderick and
Ally Sheedy as high school students who accidentally hacked a military supercomputer using an acoustic
coupler, a device that connects phone lines with computers to send and receive data.

Shortly after WarGames came Sneakers in 1992. In Sneakers, a group of hackers steal a “black box”
decoder that exploits a flaw in the encryption algorithm and uses it to hack into the air traffic control
systems and the U.S. power grid.

The fascination with hacking continues today as Hollywood scriptwriters poured out pages of epic hacker-
related entertainment from The Matrix in 1999 to Mr. Robot in 2019. However, as fictional as these stories
may be—real life holds even stranger, true hacker tails.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – October 2023 Edition 66
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