Hackers has Johnny Lee Miller playing the role of Dade Murphy (alias Zero Cool), a hacker prodigy who is found guilty of crashing 1,507 systems at just age 11.
Caught and banned from using a computer till his 18th birthday, Dade eventually finds his way back into the world of hacking. In a slightly improbable turn of fate, Dade discovers that several of his new schoolmates are also hackers.
When the youngest member of their group unwittingly discovers a security expert’s plot to steal millions of dollars from his own company, it puts the FBI on all of them, so the group finds itself in a race against time to clear their names.
When computers were cooler than you By Marcus Wong You won’t be as taken by the overthetop visual representations of the internet, programming code viruses, and high-end computer mainframes strewn throughout the movie today.
And a lot of the quotes will probably also sound dated. But, it’s likely also the first movie to attempt to portray hackers and geeks as cool.
You’ll be surprised to see how prescient the movie was too. For example, the main villain (The Plague) is a hacker-turned security consultant. In today’s terms, that would be a white hat hacker. There’s also a scene where The Plague goes on to lecture about commonly used passwords, which is very much relevant today, as passwords are still the weakest link of any system.
And the final scene where our heroes enlist the help of a global hacker army to distract the Supercomputer while they dig for evidence? That’s pretty much a DDoS attack right there. So there are certainly plenty of elements that are still relevant today.
